What I Read in 2017

Winter

It was our first New Year’s Eve without my father. I dipped strawberries in melted chocolate and watched my mother stir rice pudding. The family was coming over to our house. Despite the brutal absence, we were supposed to be celebrating. My brother, George, got engaged. I have big life news as well, I told everyone. I am quitting my job.

Family members congratulated my brother while raising their eyebrows at me. They didn’t hide their distaste when they told me I needed to reassess my life choices. They told me to wait until I found a new job first—to not be totally broke. I told them I was already broke. I told them my last Uber driver disclosed his salary to me. It was unprompted, and I wished I didn’t hear it because when I told him my salary in the same trusting nature, he asked me if my wage was even legal. On the bright side, I said, my free time will be spent searching for a husband full time. They are traditionalists who couldn’t believe I was not married with children already.

Around the same time, I was reading Zoey Leigh Peterson’s Next Year For Sure, which offered a dual perspective into a progressive relationship. Kathryn and Chris were dating for nearly a decade when Chris began to have feelings for another woman, Emily. The first chapter began with Chris admitting his crush to Emily.

This confession was not out of the ordinary for them. They had an open and honest relationship, divulging all their stories and secrets to each other. The news of Chris’ crush sent Kathryn into a flurry of wild emotions that she hid with nonchalance. Despite her instinct to shut down the idea, she encouraged Chris to date Emily. Their stable relationship of finishing each other’s sentences and nightly, weekly, and yearly routines unraveled. They knew everything about each other, including memories from before they got together. One night, Chris told Emily a new detail to the story Kathryn had heard hundreds of times; this simple act of Emily tapping into unfamiliar territory of Chris’ astonished and confused Kathryn.

I felt equally betrayed reading that. How could Chris do that to Kathryn? What was so special about Emily that he couldn’t just appreciate her as a friend? What was Kathryn thinking supporting Chris’ decision to date her and another girl at once when it made her uncomfortable? I started to reflect on all the relationships in my life, all the people who have come and gone. I didn’t know what made a person irreplaceable. I didn’t know how to trust anyone to stick around. Chris was happy with and faithful to Kathryn for a long time before he met Emily at a laundromat. A simple interaction and his feelings changed, a momentary thrill that he wanted to chase.

My dad was the person who made me happy when I was sad without trying, without knowing I was sad. Just seeing him would brighten my day. I hadn’t met anyone who’s absence I would care more about than my father’s. I didn’t give people the chance, but I saw no point.

So, I did not search for a husband in my free time, as promised. I instead focused on getting a new job. By the end of the season, I accepted and began a new marketing gig.

My coworkers decorated my desk to celebrate my last day at work.

A snippet from my goodbye party on my last day at work.

Spring

I was crying very often. And not because of my grief, but because of my job. The learning curve was rough and I was consumed by work. I went into the office early, left late, then went to sleep and dreamt about work. No matter how focused I was, my role was still challenging.

To make matters worse, I had no friends. My only companions were my boss and the Spotify Discover Weekly playlists. One day I forgot my headphones at home. Around noon, the group of people around me all began coordinating lunch plans, during which I sat with my eyes glued to the computer screen, pretending I couldn’t hear them making plans without me.

It felt bizarre spending eight hours a day being surrounded by people in an open floor plan, but feeling utterly alone. I didn’t even have a cubicle to blame. In Jeffrey Toobin’s American Heiress, Patty Hearst’s life before being kidnapped by the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) appeared fulfilled. She was engaged to and living with her math tutor, Steve Weed, who was six years her senior. It was a banal relationship she thought might be more exciting by moving in together and getting engaged. This was not the case. Toobin wrote:

Patricia cooked and cleaned; Steve did neither. They did everything, including have sex, on his schedule, not hers. Patricia made the beds or left them unmade, as she did on February 4. Their evening together on that occasion was typical. Dinner was chicken soup with tuna fish sandwiches, followed by Mission: Impossible on television, then schoolwork in silence on the downstairs sofa. Bathrobe and slippers had become her home uniform. At nineteen, this was her life? On the eve of her kidnapping, Patricia later acknowledged, she was "mildly suicidal."

I, too, felt shackled to a routine I did not want for myself: wake up, work, go home, work, sleep, and repeat. There was a lot to do and a lot more to learn. I no longer felt the rush of an idea for a new passion project in my spare time. It took me twice as long to read books. I stopped making plans on weeknights because I didn’t want to commit to anything that might force me to leave the office before my work was finished. On nights that I left the office early, I would stop by a neighboring bookstore and browse the shelves or listen to a guest speaker, feeling too tired to be inspired. Patty was trapped in an engagement; I was trapped in Outlook.

At 25, this was my life?

I pretended that not being invited to a lunch out with coworkers was what hurt, but really, I was feeling isolated from the people most important to me, my friends and family, and it wasn’t because of my headphones.

Summer

The weather was beautiful, and I was again reminded of the ugliness in this season. I braced myself for the one year anniversary of my father's death: July 14. He passed away on a Thursday; this year, it fell on a Friday. I stayed home from work and my family visited his grave together. The next day, we had a mass at church for him. I was sitting at the altar, reminded of everything I lost, when I saw four friends walk inside. They stood in the back, not understanding the Arabic prayers or Coptic writing. I joined them, and couldn’t help laughing at the sight of them. They traveled an hour out of their way, back and forth. I felt inappropriate for laughing, until I stood with my mom and watched her have the same reaction to her friend, a stranger to our religion, entering mass to stand by her side.

The following week, George, my mom, and I traveled to Egypt. I was too busy to pack my bags because of work, so my mom did. My suitcase was vibrant. It’s time to for a change, she told me. No more black clothing. I obeyed, but not without guiltily pointing out the hypocrisy in her black clothing. It’s different, she told me calmly.

It was our first time back in years. My father and I were supposed to visit Egypt the year before; our trip was scheduled for a month after his passing. Being there without my dad felt wrong. Egypt was his home. When my grandparents moved the family to America, my father was the only one left behind. He refused to leave, instead choosing to crash with his aunt and cousin. It took two years for them to finally force him onto a plane to the States. After he moved, he went back to Egypt every year, sometimes twice a year.

He always said he wanted to retire in Egypt by the Red Sea. I loved Egypt, too. I spent almost every summer of my life in Egypt, always beginning the fall school year much chunkier because of my many helpings of its delicious, high-caloric food. The loud streets of Cairo echoed my father’s presence in every corner. I associated everything, from the dusty air to the sun’s enveloping blaze, with him. Egypt was still his home.

In Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, the character Bernadette barely left her home. She found solace in it, despite its incomplete renovation. When her daughter asked to go on a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for good grades, Bernadette hesitantly agreed. She had (what I would diagnose as) mild agoraphobia. In an effort to prepare, she contacted her virtual assistant for the strongest medicine for seasickness (“stronger than Dramamine”), among other excessive requests. The highlighted theatrics behind her anxiety makes it easy for readers to gloss over the sacrificial nature of Bernadette. She felt true conflict in leaving her comfort zone, and although she plots ways to back out of the trip, she ultimately planned to go on the trip for her daughter.

Our trip to Egypt was difficult for me, but for my mother it was a repeating stab to the heart. She was surrounded by her entire family in her home country. She should have been happy, but she couldn’t fully be. She never spoke too much about her feelings. She would cry a little some days. Other times, she’d talk about my father to elicit reminiscence from people. Most of the time, she seemed to enjoy the moments without mentioning him.

One night, we were sitting outside, the only noise the sound of the can of OFF! being passed around. To no one in particular, maybe to the sky, she said, I miss him.

I remembered in that moment something that keeps me up at night. My mom had been living outside of her comfort zone for a year. I didn't want to wonder if that would ever change.

Fall

Now it was time for my oldest brother, Joe, to make an announcement: he was moving. To Cyprus. In two weeks. He’d quit his job and was moving back home for the two weeks in between. I stayed with him and enjoyed the short time I got to live under the same roof with my brothers, possibly for the last time ever. Growing up in a tight-knit family (my cousins lived right next door for most of my life), no one took this news lightly. The idea of me moving a train ride away from New Jersey was already a world away in their minds. Moving across the globe to a foreign country no one had ever visited was staggering.

This return to our childhoods felt very ordinary, otherwise. My brothers and I fell into our old routines of racing to use the bathroom in the morning and spending far too long trying to agree on a movie to watch. Before I knew it, I was waking up to hug and kiss my brother goodbye and safe travels. I kept pestering him for a return date, foolishly asking if he’d try to come back for Christmas. Christmas was a month away, and although it made no sense for him to return in that time, I could not comprehend celebrating the holiday without him.

It was beginning to be the holiday season, and I was glum. There was a time in my life when this time of the year was my favorite. I loved shopping for my family and friends, excited by a holiday that promoted gift giving.

This year, I asked my family if we could skip the gifts and tree. All I saw in Christmas trees was the mess that would be left to clean in January. George was insistent on a tree. My mother compromised by setting a miniature tree in the family room.

While everyone around me expressed gratitude for all they had, I felt burdened by all I’d lost. My favorite thing about life--my family--had dwindled from five to three. My boisterous tight-knit extended family that I saw multiple times a month rarely got together anymore.

I read André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name next to my dog by my family’s fireplace. A comforting surrounding for a heart-wrenching story. It took place in Italy, sometime in the 1980s, and was written from the perspective of 17-year-old Elio. Elio was attracted to his family’s summer guest, Oliver, and experienced a full body and mental torment as he idolized Oliver from across the backyard. He compared the feeling to fire: “Not a fire of passion, not a ravaging fire, but something paralyzing, like the fire of cluster bombs that suck up the oxygen around them and leave you panting because you’ve been kicked in the gut and a vacuum has ripped up every living lung issue and dried your mouth, and you hope nobody speaks, because you can’t talk, and you pray no one asks you to move, because your heart is clogged and beats so fast it would sooner spit out shards of glass than let anything else flow through its narrowed chambers.”

The two spent their afternoons together and came together in a triumphant, intense bond. Their passion lasted what felt like seconds, but was actually a few weeks, before Oliver had to return back to the States.

When Oliver visited a few months later, he was engaged to someone else. Years passed. Oliver got married, had kids. Elio was successful in an unspecified field; he got involved with people he identified as “those after Oliver.” Their few reunions were outwardly platonic and mostly reminiscent. Their actions were restricted, but Elio’s, and I’d like to believe Oliver’s, feelings of longing from so long ago were unchanged.

The notion that feelings live on, with the capacity to bring back a few weeks of one summer, scared me. It was years later and Elio still subconsciously craved Oliver’s touch. He would never fully get over him. Time didn’t actually heal all.

A few months after my dad passed away, a friend told me he wished I could go back to normal, to the old Nat he loved. I should have been mad at him, but instead I felt awful. I felt awful because it occurred to me that I would never be the same, that I lost the person I once was. Until this, I experienced nothing substantial to be sad about. Sure, I found things: bad grades, boys, the movie My Dog Skip. Never anything tangible. An old coworker once told me I didn’t walk, I skipped. It was true. I was free of pain.

I’ll never have that freedom back. I identify as someone who’s lost a parent. Suddenly. So, so sadly. And that’s a narrative that I’m not sure I’ll ever escape.

I expect more pain will come. Like Elio and Oliver, I will experience a full life, find love elsewhere, etc. But these feelings of grief will always be there. My father was my best friend, and if mourning him is the consequence of loving him, then my heart will forever dress in black.

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Natalia is an editor of Things Created By People. Find more of her work on her website.

Making Peace (and Finding My Own) with the De-Intensification of Britney Spears

Throughout the years generally agreed upon as her “prime,” one way in which Britney Spears remained such a thrilling performer was dancing ahead of the beat. This accomplished two things, really. It presented Britney as prepared and unstoppable, the choreography engrained in her body and spirit to the point that performing it was effortless. She was insatiable, relentlessly seeking the thrill of the next move. But the more you watch Britney perform at this speed, the more you realize there’s something deeper being going on here. Take the dance break in “Me Against The Music” as performed on Saturday Night Live. The effect makes Britney look like she is flying through space and time, while her dancers remain firmly grounded in Studio 8H, Eastern Standard. They are joining her on that stage because the public has years of visual training instructing them that a couple layers of humans do, in fact, belong behind our star.

But they also, purposefully or not, act to highlight just how capable Britney is of doing the whole thing on her own. Being in front of her dancers, too, means Britney’s satisfied facial expressions can only be linked to her knowing she’s killing it; she cannot see the full picture they’ve created as a team. It’s striking she never once makes eye contact with any of them – even when she turns around, so do they. This lack of human connection with those mere inches from her is a theme in Britney’s work as a performer. Perhaps its for the best; when she does attempt to engage with her dancers directly, she ends their lives with the movement of her hips, finds herself more interested in her cameras than her grinding partner, or, is blindfolded. The most intimately engaged I’ve seen Britney with a dance partner was when she dance-battled herself.

As a queer person whose formative years took place squarely within the Bible Belt, I too know a little bit about dance-battling myself in the mirror. I have a feeling most queer people do, actually; evidence suggests I am far from the first or last gay kid to privately turn themselves into a star, and exist within that fantasy world throughout each lackluster day, the fantasy becoming its clearest and most vivid whilst completely alone. That’s what I find most miraculous about those videos of young queer kids slaying their favorite pop routines; they accidentally reveal the grueling rehearsal schedules within the secret, private lives of the child performers. How much time do you think Robert E. Jeffrey spent in front of his mirror to get Madonna’s “Vogue” down pat? And as a fellow student of the material, I can personally vouch for Brendan Jordan that Gaga’s “A-R-T-P-O-P” hand choreo is no small feat to master.

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The tour in which Britney dance-battled herself was the Dream Within a Dream Tour, and it is over the course of this two-year outing she and Justin Timberlake famously uncoupled. This is to say the tour started off dark and just got darker. By the second leg, she had replaced a cute, expository introduction to the battle song (“Who is this chick? I think she wants to battle me. Huh? Whew!”) for something pointedly anti-male (“This is a song for ALL my girls”), indicating a harsh shift in perspective: no matter the girl, and no matter the boy, the girl’s gonna get screwed. While on the surface, this seems to be Britney dealing with young straight love gone awry, I always took it to mean much more. This proclamation felt more anti-humankind than just merely boys. One thing that astounded me about the Dream Within a Dream Tour was its through line of superhero independence. On top of dance-battling her evil twin, Britney is kidnapped (honestly, an exhausting amount of times), endures a thunderstorm, and plays a girl trapped in a music box, never to find her true love (during her three most overtly romantic songs). In fact, Britney never once achieves romantic satisfaction – even when the mood shifts in favor of passion, it’s her dancers getting it on, Britney watching longingly. By the time Britney finishes the show, one can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief – not just because it’s an exhausting technical feat, but because it’s a miracle whatever character Britney is playing survived this whole plight on her own (her dancers certainly never helped; they were too busy kidnapping her). Whether she had to break through a large net, bungee off the edge of a flying cliff, or endure a loneliness her narrator – Jon Voight, by the way – makes a point to describe as both insufferable and eternal – Britney always escaped to safety, and she did it, each time, without any help. It was a 90-minute concept performance about the ineptitude of anyone else to make you happy – or, really do anything but annoy or traumatize you. The New York Times review of the show was titled “Exchanging Her Halo for a Cloak of Darkness.” So, listen, I swear – I wasn’t alone on this one, you guys.

But so what if I was? That’s kind of the idea Britney was throwing into the ether in 2002 – being alone was not the end of the world; in fact, it was noble. It made you invincible – faster than those behind you, hyper-alert, firing off on all cylinders, blasting toward the ultimate destination of career dominance. This was a conclusion I had been forced to come up with on my own, as someone who did not see himself in any romantic relationships I’d been exposed to, both in my personal life and through pop culture. But now, I had a mascot for it – and she was the most famous human in the world. If our country’s most beloved icon didn’t need anyone, neither did I. This is convenient for a queer kid who certainly wouldn’t have anyone for a while – and at the time, thought maybe ever. “One day I will be as powerful as the most insane images the outer limits of my imagination can conjure. If anyone has a problem with me, it simply won’t matter in a few years, because I will be universally adored – a type of adoration more important than any type of personal or, ew, …intimate one.” Sixteen years later, I find myself wondering if those feelings have served their purpose, and are supposed to go away.

When Britney danced ahead of the song’s beat for a small measurement of time akin to that of her ex-boyfriend’s wardrobe malfunction, the results were thrilling. When she let herself get even faster, though, it could deliver the opposite effect: our Queen was ready to wrap this sucker up, and get backstage to a warm bowl of cheese grits. She didn’t care that no matter how fast she rushed through her marks, there’s only so much wiggle room with which a show largely set to a track can bend. It was as if, for ninety minutes, she was trapped in structure she was faster than, better than, and, ultimately, over.

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Regardless of her motivations for dancing at warp-speed, Britney spent years setting a precedent. Which is one of the many reasons why her 2007 VMA performance was so confounding; lagging just wasn’t Britney’s thing and here she was. This performance acted as a catalyst to a near-decade-long process of a fan re-standardization of our expectations for Britney’s live shows. While her music remained truly exciting, tours supporting the new goods were met with confusion online. YouTube clips from the Circus and Femme Fatale tours became message board deliberations between two groups. In one corner, you had the upset fans wishing Britney would come out and slay one more time for old time’s sake. In the other, understanding fans citing a variety of reasons she couldn’t – or didn’t have to, given what she’d already given us.

I was always a member of the former camp. Even as things started looking positive for Britney, with a stable Vegas residency that allowed her more time with her children and created a structure within which she could seemingly retrieve a good chunk of the pep in her step, I wasn’t seeing it. When the opposing camp would bring up that perhaps – just perhaps – Britney was happier now – with a stable home life, less grueling schedule, and easier performance style leaning harder on “fun” than “culture-shifting,” my brain could not compute an equation that rendered a lack of gravitas and a disinterest in striving toward mass public adoration – with happiness. Britney is a god and she should be performing like her god counterparts, not becoming a niche act for the nostalgic. For many years, I allowed myself no joy in the de-intensification of Britney Spears. It was my pop cultural torture chamber, watching someone I loved so much trade in owning the cultural zeitgeist with every shake of her pelvis or soda endorsement - for something nearing closer, day by day, to personal fulfillment. Even as her other fans celebrated her new personal successes – and tried as they may to invite me on board their ship – I saw no benefits in the trade-off and pouted at the dock.

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As recently as August of 2016, Britney seemed to be sticking to a life of independence akin to the dystopian single-girl vision from Dream Within a Dream. Appearing on Carpool Karaoke with James Cordon, Britney was asked “What are you looking for in a guy?” She responds curtly, “I think I might not ever go to men again. I may never do the men thing anymore, or get married, I’m just done with men.” A shocked Cordon gets her to backtrack a bit – but not by much. “I might French kiss someone,” she admits, but then, as if catching herself straying from a hard-fought resolution, doubles back down, “But I’m not going to marry anyone, no. I don’t believe in marriage anymore.” Britney’s romantic receptors were still firmly in the OFF position, but something new was beginning: she was developing an interest in connecting with others – any interested parties, really - more intimately. Britney’s world had been shrouded in secrecy for years; then, all of the sudden, her Instagram became an intense – yet playful and funny – vision board of her psyche. The idea that personal fulfillment could be valuable - not in spite of its seeming lack of relevance to a consumer, but because of it – became an idea her Instagram account presented with gusto. It has inspired a weekly podcast, Britney’s Gram, where comedians Barbara and Tess analyze Brit’s posts with the scrutiny of Justin Timberlake watching his ex kiss Madonna. Showing off personal growth for Britney as a person first and foremost – any gains in her career falling to the wayside – became an interesting development when I could see it first-hand. I was here for it. Furthermore, the idea that an interest in self-care – as opposed to an obsession with career-excellence – could lead to new creative discoveries and possibilities is not something I’d even considered until seeing Britney take up painting. Or watched her pull out two non-singles from five albums ago during her big career retrospective at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards, simply because she wanted to. Or seen her – live vocals and all – cover a 1991 Bonnie Rait song on her Vegas stage, because she’d just learned – in 2017 – that people thought she lip-synced. These decisions are simply too random not to be her own, and in the same way that they lost all their sense(s), they also became as thrilling to watch as dancing ahead of the beat. And at the end of the day, perhaps the most intriguing new idea I’m processing from 2018ney is that all this self-care and opening oneself up to new possibilities – could, whether you like it or not, bring someone special into your life. It might even do so quickly – for instance, less than two years after you told James Cordon on national TV you were done with special someones. (To be fair, I guess it is possible Britney and her boyfriend are only French kissing…)

Growing up queer and closeted, you spent a lot of time alone – but you also spend a lot of time testing the boundaries of opening up to others, and being subsequently disappointed by your decision to do so. Sometimes, loved ones abandon you at an age so young you don’t realize what even happened until much later. You get used to this and you take care of yourself. Until it becomes exhausting, and you join a large club of young souls who’ve given up. Intimate human relationships based on truth and openness seem so impossible that the hope of them happening one day cannot build up the muscle to take on the facts of their impossibility. Your relationship with your family and friends is actually not your own, but that of them and your invented self – someone shy on personal details, obsessed with personal accomplishments, and uninterested in romantic possibilities. And they like this person, and this person is a performance you’ve perfected to the point you’re flying through space and time effortlessly when you embody them, so it feels fine to let it go on as long as need be. But what does it look like when you realize you have been trapped in structure you are faster than, better than, and, ultimately, over? And then: how do you break out of it, and let someone – a special someone – in?

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Recently I found myself asking my friends what the point of a romantic relationship was. This type of provocation is not new between me and my straight buddies – I spent many a closeted teenage year insisting they were lesser than I for craving companionship, proving they were but half a human whereas I was (obviously) whole. But this recent conversation felt different; I was genuinely curious as to their answer. I had lost track of what the allure was in the first place, and was confounded anyone even tried when they could have those hours shared with another – nervous first dates, attending partners’ shows, “enjoying” lazy Sunday mornings watching Netflix in bed – back to themselves. When my friends helped me understand that relationships were more about self-nourishment in-the-now than any grand scheme for the world or one’s success in it – their answer felt useless. What’s the point of nourishing the self, if the self is but a temporary endurance test spiraling toward a future dream? A dream that might take everything in you to get even a tenth of? A dream that can’t afford distractions; one that can’t afford being thrown off by anybody? Besides, past attempts at intimacy have only left you knocked down.

But what I think I can gather from watching Britney living right now in 2018 is that sometimes it may be worth trying again. To connect with others; to reckon with how that is bettering yourself. And perhaps that “distraction” – that relationship with someone special – is not a distraction at all. But rather, a little dream within your dream. Especially if your head is on a little straighter than the first time you gave it a go. 

Besides, maybe this instinct to break free from loneliness is always there. There’s a reason both little Robert and Brendan gave the world a glimpse of their private mirror routines when cameras were rolling, and they finally had a chance to shine. There’s a reason I performed my routines in front of my bedroom window for my bully who lived a couple houses down. Would he be so moved by my performance he’d stop making fun of me? Probably not. Would he be so allured by sick (Darrin’s) dance grooves that he might fall in love with me, securing my first boyfriend/bully hybrid?… I knew I wouldn’t know if I didn’t try! You see, there’s a lot of greatness to be shared in these elaborate worlds a queer brain weaves since childhood. And in the words of the Queen – on her most recent album, in fact – “Nobody should be alone if they don’t have to be.”

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Michael Doshier is a New York based writer, musician, and performer. As a writer, he's contributed to The Talkhouse, Things Created By People, and Viacom's Logo Movie House. As a musician, he's traveled internationally as Johnny Darlin, performing multimedia cabarets with his keytar, most recently at the 2018 Prague Fringe Festival. He co-hosts the weekly podcast Queers on Queens, and his next EP "Way With Words" is due out Summer 2018. Catch his performance of "Songs About Boys" at the Queerly Festival in New York City this June 23rd and 26th. 

Wonders

I.

Two different people played me “Fall of the Star High School Running Back” a few hours apart. I like to believe it was a plot—they were in that conspiratorial pre-hook-up phase—but it wasn’t. They plugged their phones into the shitty radio in my Grams’ old car, their words haunting one another’s as they told me you’re gonna love this. 

I did not. I thought it was needlessly twee. But I trusted them both, and when a week later I packed up my dorm room and started driving west, I decided to give All Hail West Texas a genuine try. 

Over the course of that week, I had graduated college with a diploma with the wrong name on it. I’d passed for the first time. I’d driven away from a rebound who had been his own sort of driving away from a partner. I was alone with my body for the first time since I was teenager. My trunk was full of alcohol swabs and needles that made me shake to think about. And here was John Darnielle, telling me to hail satan, that the pirate’s life was for me, that I was the one thing in the universe god didn’t have his eyes on. 

I laughed. I whooped. I didn’t cry, but I thought about it. And then he sang: And I want to go home, but I am home. 

I did not dissociate, but I did leave my body. It felt like the fight club I’d been in the year I started coming out, the night where I told a much stronger friend who’d been holding back that he could hold back a little less and he immediately knocked the wind out of me. As I slumped against the fridge in the dorm lounge, trying to reassure him that I was fine even though I couldn’t get any words out, I felt the place where the pain was and I felt my lungs and I felt the rest of my body and I felt his hands and his breath as he tried to help me up and I heard myself laughing and I could feel that I meant it but it all felt invented somehow. My homes were gone.

II.

He’d been straight and I’d been out our whole relationship. We grew into the cognitive dissonance kind of beautifully. He was shitty about it for a few months—something I’d never put up with now, but I was twenty and afraid and ashamed—and I’m glad I stuck it out, because once I really explained it to him, he got on board. He even got me a binder for Valentine’s Day. 

He told me he was scared he wouldn’t be attracted to me when I looked and smelled and sounded different. He told me he was scared that I would turn into a different person. I never wanted to be monogamous but agreed to it because it was a hard line for him, and now I wondered if it was a bad idea to try to be present with my body while it felt like a shared thing. We never acknowledged my plans to start T as a factor in our break up; we went right from planning our wedding to being unable to compromise on where we’d move after graduation. 

We saw each other twice after the break up. The first time I was two and a half months on T. He had come back east to visit his other friends at my college right before we graduated. The first thing he said to me: “You look different. You sound different.”I held him while he cried about I don’t remember what on the steps of an academic building after dark. 

The second time was a month after that in the home in LA that he built with a Craigslist roommate and not with me. It took both of us to walk the last of his shit from my car to his room, books and blankets and men’s clothes I’d used for practice. Instead of trading mixes like we used to we spoke vaguely of songs we knew the other would never try out. I tried to explain “The Mess Inside”without saying anything about him, or about us, or about how I’d tried to scream sing it in my car every single day since the first time I heard it but I didn’t know how to make my new voice scream or sing so I got scared and whispered. He loved concept albums, so I told him about All Hail West Texas, but all I could talk about was how the sound quality was only okay and the song titles were pretentious and it was mostly acoustic guitar, all things he hated. 

My car broke later that day, stranding me in California for a few extra hours. I texted him that I would like to see him again, but this time to fight or fuck or do something, anything, that approached acknowledging what I thought we had meant to each other. He declined.

III.

I first heard Against Me! on Thanksgiving. My friend didn’t want to go to their parents’ house, so I got up early to visit them before going to see my own straight family. They’d just moved to New York and they were tremendously broke and tremendously depressed. We smoked cigarettes on their stoop and took off our pants and got under their quilt and decided to try out Transgender Dysphoria Blues. I remember holding hands and how at that moment in time, they were one of the only people allowed to touch me; I remember feeling their fingernails inside my skin; I remember how tightly we squeezed when Laura Jane Grace said that she should have been a mother, she should have been a wife, she should have been gone from here years ago she should be living a different life and how it still wasn’t tight enough. 

Four months later we’d borrowed my college roommate’s boyfriend’s car and driven to Long Island because that was the nearest place we could get tickets to see Against Me!. By the time Grace came out for the encore, I’d fallen in love with the crowd, in love with the band, in love with my friend, in love with myself. She was alone on stage, and she told us that she was going to do a song by John Darnielle. I tried to suspend myself in the moment before getting invested—the Mountain Goats have so many songs, and I knew so few then—but I am energetic and hopeful and I’ve yet to find a way to stop myself from going all in at a moment’s notice. Then she said that she was going to play “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton.”

I gripped my friend’s arm too tightly or I didn’t touch them, I can’t remember. I was with them and I was alone and both were more true than they had ever been before. When it was over, they whispered into my ear, factual: “Something just happened to you.” Then they disappeared into the mosh pit. 

In the car on the way home, my ears rang with the quiet and the darkness of the suburbs. It took longer than usual for it to feel like it was time, and when it did, I tried to tell them. “That song was all that I listened to on my road trip after college. I wasn’t passing at the beginning of the trip and I was at the end and I learned that song the first day I was alone on the highway and I...” They listened well. It didn’t feel bad that I couldn’t explain it.

IV.

I have friends now who didn’t know me before my medical transition. I wish that they did. I want everyone to know all of me all at once. New friends may not be able to know my old voice or my chest without scars or what it’s like to think of me first by my birth name, but I can try to fold them into the history of my body. So it’s one of these friends who I asked to design my “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” tattoo (just two tiny horns, which is stupidly obvious and perfect and something I would never have thought of by myself). I got the tattoo alone. I spent a lot of time in the suspended state of knowing that the artist was wrong about what he thought my body was. 

Next week, the tattoo designer and I are going to see the Mountain Goats’ Goths tour. I will be getting to her place many hours before the show so that we can go full goth, lipstick and nail polish and a corset she’s going to lend me. I don’t think anyone else will be dressed up, but I hope it makes people glad to see that we are. It will make us glad to see ourselves.

Sometimes I get transported so powerfully by music that I am in multiple places at once. Not split between them, but fully in each of them, and each of them fully encompassing me. I wonder, next week, where I will be, and what that will feel like. Will I feel trapped or free in my car? Will the ex’s apartment feel like a flaming scar or a blink? Will I be able to explain any of this to my friend if I can just hold her hand tight enough? With my scars and her corset and our music playing all around, will I still want to go home? 

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Jamie Beckenstein is a community worker, oral historian, tarot reader, and writer based out of Queens, New York. You can learn more about their work at transembassy.com and more about them at jamiebeckenstein.com.

Thin and Beautiful

“You and I are not the kind of women who can forget that we have a weight problem. That’s just how it is.”

— Therapist to Joanna, from Thin For Life

This is the story of how I turned into that person.

Timeline

In the 2nd grade, my doctor told my mother that I should be put on a diet. I remember being offended that the doctor told my mother as if I weren’t even standing there. In fourth grade, classmates remarked that they wouldn’t want to see my body at a pool party. By seventh grade, I was called Fat Sarah or Whale by at least three or four boys daily on the school bus. On AOL instant messenger, several students anonymously told me I was chunky or ugly. As a sixth-grader, a friend’s brother told me I should be nice and skinny like our other friend, Christine. I didn’t see a reason to have any self-esteem, which resulted in tenaciously holding onto a middle school boyfriend that dumped me seven times. When I finished eighth grade, I was down to 137 lbs through extreme dieting. After drinking alcohol with my cousin at New Year’s, she showed me how to throw up on demand. Thankfully, due to having a friend whose teeth had decayed from severe bulimia, I didn’t feel compelled to purge very often.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was back up to 160-165 lbs. By 11th grade, I was down to 145 lbs thanks to Weight Watchers. By this point I had started exercising consistently. At Weight Watchers meetings, I was shocked to meet a woman who confessed to eating in a bathroom at her lowest point. I couldn’t understand how someone could ever get to that point. By 12th grade, I was down to 137 lbs. I realized I could eat less than Weight Watchers allowed so absurdly I started counting how many bites of food I allowed myself per day. I was terrified to see that this diet may have become mainstream five years later.

Through my freshman year of college, I dipped to my all-time low of 134 lbs, before I finally ended the school year at 157 lbs. My weight skyrocketed as I tried to save time by skipping the gym and I mistakenly believed I might be able to eat “like a normal person” and maintain my weight.

Eating like a normal person quickly turned into an excuse to eat everything I had craved and denied myself the past two years: pop tarts, peanut butter and jelly, Reese’s peanut butter cups, cookie dough, bagels, ice cream, even vanilla frosting. My diet had become so terrible and so embarrassing that I did what I once found unfathomable: I ate in the bathroom stall of my science building. I didn’t want anyone to ask me what I was eating (peanut butter and jelly mixed with cookie crumbs). I avoided mirrors, a scale, and any other signs which may have forced me to face the truth. The idea of having regained the weight I lost was so traumatic I continued to wear my “skinny” jeans even when I had to unbutton the zipper after sitting down for long stretches of time. I continued to wear those jeans even when they ripped open at the inner thighs. The holes were barely noticeable when walking, but I remember wearing them to the airport twice and getting patted down by the same woman. I can’t imagine what she was thinking when she pressed her gloved hand on my jeans and felt two gaping holes twice.

One of my worst memories was coming home from college having put on close to 20 lbs. The boyfriend that I hadn’t seen in months was silent about it. My brother joked about it and no part of me could laugh or even mention my weight. In the summer I got down to 149 with my three-apples-a-day-diet (and nothing more). My extreme dieting also led to occasional weekends of binging, including my birthday in which I ate so much threw up shortly after trying to go to bed. I regained the weight by the end of summer. Through my sophomore year, my weight had ranged from 149 to 169 lbs as I cheated Weight Watchers. Through junior year, I weighed 146 lbs for about a week before I started cheating Weight Watchers again. In the Spring semester of my senior year I went abroad where I was without a scale or measuring tape for four months. Terrified of gaining weight, I asked my host mother to cook me salad and grilled chicken or fish for all meals. Nonetheless, I would lie to her up to three times a week and say I was going to eat out with friends when really I went to Haagen Dazs alone to have a Belgian waffle with scoops of ice cream on top. Once, when my host mom set up a date with me and her nephew, I sent him home after I claimed to be too tired to go out; what I really wanted was to binge on ice cream. I was mortified when I bumped into my host mom and host dad at the ice cream shop. I can guess now that I was probably around 145-155 lbs during my time in Spain, which were relatively “good” numbers for me. When I graduated college, I weighed over 164 lbs. I had entered college weighing 137 lbs. I felt like an absolute failure.

In the two years since I’ve graduated college, I’ve continued to vacillate between the 150s and 160s. As I type this story, I weigh 155.0.

My Skinny Journey

The earliest age I can clearly remember dieting is at age 13. I found lots of “thinspo” and “thinspiration” through Xanga, an older blogging website, and saw other girls post their daily caloric intakes. Let me be clear: if these girls were posting their true diets on these websites, they were unequivocally anorexic. I knew that at the time and didn’t care. They looked good, which was all that mattered. I started eating 600 calories a day. Ironically, eating that little can actually make it harder to lose weight because it slows down one’s metabolism so much. Thankfully this extreme dieting phase only lasted about a month. Scarily, I remember my hunger pangs simply going away. I was able to eat a single piece of sushi all day and still feel comfortable and energized. I got to 135 lbs this way.

Since then, for at least seven years I have obsessed with my Body Mass Index (BMI). BMI is a tool used by physicians to determine whether you fall into the underweight, ideal, overweight or obese category according to your height bracket.

I was simply consumed with fitting into the “healthy” category of a BMI below 25. I was able to maintain a “healthy” BMI for about two or three years in high school. I preferred fast food and chain restaurants solely for the fact that they had calorie counts (and at times I am still comforted by a meal free of worrying about over or under-counting calories). Once, I ordered a boiled potato at an elegant Spanish restaurant because that was the only food I could definitively count on Weight Watchers (even this was a false premise; my family still won’t let me live that down).

After graduating high school, my weight had increased to up to 20 lbs above the BMI healthy limit (possibly more, of course I couldn’t weigh myself at that point). Sometimes my waist circumference would even be in the healthy category, and this I don’t put in quotation marks because visceral fat (the kind around your waist, and around your internal organs) is really the fat that is dangerous.

Even though I knew I was healthy in the important measures, I was still obsessed with that number. I became self-conscious of wanting to go into a health profession, in which I would be coaching patients on healthier lifestyles, when I myself had a BMI over 25. In my mind, it was the ultimate hypocrisy.

I realized I hit rock bottom when I was at one of my best friends’ engagement party.

First: A friend commented on how thin I looked. I said thanks but snidely replied that “I was still 12 lbs overweight,” so in my mind of course it didn’t matter how I looked. I was still fat, and I had no protection if I felt big or unattractive. The healthy BMI range was my shield; it could justify any remark with the feeling that I knew “I was in the healthy category” so I’m by definition, not fat.

Second: Leaving that same party, my friend invited me to visit him up in Boston. Again, I snapped. I don’t want to do anything until I lose 12 lbs! He knew I was crazy and this was “my thing” so he let it go. He told me loved me and hoped I had fun. I reduced his beautiful party to simply “having a lot of unhealthy food.”

An event he planned for months, that he sent out beautiful invitations for, that he spent his personal money on, that he had invited all his family members and only his absolute best friends to. I reduced it to being an environment that had high-calorie snacks that I ate too much of.

Something had to change. I was so angry at myself. I drowned myself in research and reflection. I can’t believe in the BMI scale anymore. Being factually in the overweight category never inspired me to change, become healthier or “resist” unhealthy food. It just made me feel helpless, de-motivated, stressed and unattractive. I had to believe that “BMI is bogus.” This is why I support the Fat Acceptance movement: it promotes body acceptance, not hatred, as the media (and your friends) do by suggesting thinner always means more beautiful. (For example: “10 Ways to Get Flatter Abs Today”; “How to Lose 5 lbs in One Week”; “You look AMAZING. Have you lost weight?!”; “Wow! You look so thin!”

I used to be very guilty of making these comments. If you accept your body and your size you are more likely to make healthier decisions that are better for you. And this is why I try not to buy magazines that fill their front covers with thin-centric messages that suggest you are not thin enough. And that is why I’m trying to be a lot more conscious of how I contribute, and thus, tell my friends that they are beautiful all the time, and not only when they’re thin.

Lessons

I’ve tried to drown myself in peer-reviewed research to try to make sense of why this has all been so difficult for me. Understanding the science behind why certain foods have addictive properties and learning about other weight losers’ struggles helps me to accept why I’ll never be “normal” around food. The lessons I’ve learned, from many books, documentaries, articles, research papers on the topic, are the following:

It is extremely difficult and rare to maintain a weight loss for more than 1 year, even more difficult to keep it off for 5+ years.

This is largely because in trying to lose weight or maintain a new weight, you are fighting the biology that was naturally selected for you through the course of human evolution. When humans didn’t know when their next meal would come, those who had the evolutionary “drive” to store the most fat were those that survived. As a result, we’re genetically programmed to desire and enjoy highly caloric, high fat, high sugar foods. For example: If your body was ever at a larger size, then you must consume fewer calories than another person at that same weight who has always been that weight.

I entered the magical 140s (magical because it was part of the healthy BMI range) at least six times in my life and gained the weight back. My longest stretch in this category was about three years. When I was unable to lose the “freshman 15” after my first year of college, I was embarrassed to go out in public, especially in my hometown. For three years I had based too much of my identity on someone who successfully lost and maintained that new weight. But I have lost and gained these 10-20 lbs almost every year since that time.

If it’s in front of you, it’s hard not to eat it.

My opinion, which is not in accord with all scientists, is that it’s not just about discipline. It’s about a food environment where the easy choice is almost always the unhealthy, obesogenic choice.

Over and over again I tried to buy junk food and resist eating it. I have memories of eating eight pop tarts or twenty-four pieces of cookie dough in a single day. I used to keep Betty Crocker’s vanilla icing in my dorm room and dip Girl Scout Cookies or Grandma’s Vanilla Sandwich Crèmes in them. I know I can’t buy junk food like this because binging makes my life miserable. I’ve become so used to this kind of life that sometimes I forget how abnormal I am. Recently I mentioned to an acquaintance that I had eaten a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in a single sitting and they were taken aback. I have eaten an entire pint of ice cream on so many occasions that I forget that anyone has the discipline to stick to one “serving size” (a fourth of the pint).

Sugar is not a “neutral” food providing “empty calories” just because it is devoid of nutrients.

Table sugar is called sucrose, which is made up of two parts: glucose and fructose. The sweeter component, fructose, is what really makes sugar such a powerful, controversial item. Fructose is the part of sugar that activates the reward centers of our brains and, as Dr. Lustig puts it, “we love [fructose]. We go out of our way to find it. Evolutionarily, there is no foodstuff on the planet that has fructose that is poisonous.” Thus, humans who liked fructose were naturally selected for because they were more likely to survive and breed children. This theory forms the evolutionary biology explanation for why humans evolved to like, even love, sugar (specifically fructose). Food containing sugar is like a “Darwinian signal” informing us that a food is safe. Food companies have taken advantage of this biological hack and attempt to sell more food by adding sugar to ketchup, bread, mustard, dressing and even meat. When more sugar is added to food, people eat more of it. Further, sugar prolongs the shelf life of food making it an even more popular additive. Unsurprisingly, excess sugar consumption is associated with obesity.

This lesson goes along with all the previous lessons: It’s really hard to keep weight off and that’s partly because it’s hard not to eat food when it’s in front of you. It’s especially hard to resist food in front of you when it’s sweet. I have an infamous sweet tooth: for my 17th birthday, a friend gifted me one of Costco’s 1000 packet boxes of Splenda. I opened it June 17th, and it was finished before school started in September.

Lastly, a calorie is not just a calorie.

Some calories keep you full and others don’t. Calories with fiber keep you full. A calorie is a calorie in a laboratory setting where study participants are locked up for a week and can only consume the food they are given. But in the real world, calories from processed food don’t keep you full so it’s much more difficult to lose weight.

Processed food calories don’t have fiber, which is important because it helps to keep you full. Fiber is also what makes the sugar in fruit safe and “neutral,” unlike added sugars – the fibers in fruit help to trigger your satiety signals and thus prevent you from overeating and damaging your liver. As Dr. Lustig points out, try eating 11 oranges and you will find it nearly impossible to consume them all. On the other hand, consuming the liquid equivalent of 11 oranges is easy because the fiber is removed by juicing the fruit. Processing food includes stripping food of its fiber because removing it prolongs a food’s shelf life. This information helped me to give up on eating candy all day.

Where I Am Now

I can relate to many of the people featured in HBO’s Weight of the Nation: Choices documentary. I can relate to Yolanda, who has to throw out half of her Kit-Kat bar when she buys a 210-calorie bar because it’s just too hard for me to not eat the whole thing. I can relate to Vivia, who at 5’5” weighs 341 lbs. She explains that “food can be my best friend… Food can be my boyfriend at the moment.” I know exactly what she feels like. I remember a particular moment when I felt neglected by a boyfriend – my thoughts were immediately “at least I’ll always have chocolate.” And even though I told myself I wouldn’t become someone more interested in food than people, seconds after my high school boyfriend went away to college I ate an entire box of Weight Watchers fudge bars. I can relate to the woman who can gain 10 lbs back in a weekend; my record is 11 lbs in just a week.

In order to keep myself accountable, I’ve had a food and exercise diary since 2012, now nearing 200 pages. I try to withhold telling family and friends what my favorite sweets are because it has always led to good-intentioned friends gifting me binge-worthy food. Upon learning that I would try to withhold this information from them, however, they would just buy me more sleeves of Oreo cookies and pints of hazelnut ice cream. 

I still cannot gift people sweets, because I’ve eaten the sweets I’ve intended to give people. I won’t allow myself to buy more than one sweet at a time because it's a signal that I'm about to binge. When I do buy those sweets, I won’t buy anything over 600 calories unless I plan on throwing some of it away as soon as I buy it. While this may sound restrictive, I actually allow myself to eat all sweets and don’t feel the need to binge in the way I used to. I’m much more relaxed having these little rules to live by because I know if I throw a little bit of the package of cookie dough out beforehand, I won’t eat it until my stomach hurts and I only want to lie in bed.

Trying to enact political change also helps me to cope with my obsession and painful past. The role of government is to take on issues that are too large for us to solve individually. “Eat less, move more” encourages us to make healthier decisions, but the weight of the nation continues to rise. While I am fully responsible for my weight fluctuations in the past, I would still like to help create an environment where it is difficult for a child to grow up obese. Being mocked everyday riding the bus to school made me want to get skinny at any cost –- exactly the kind of extreme dieting and deprivation that led to binging and self-hatred. Modern dining now means the normalization of 20 oz. soda bottles instead of 8 oz., of pizza slices that are 700 calories at Costco, of happy “meals” far cheaper than fresh produce or real, unprocessed food. This normalization makes growing up fat easier to do.

I would like to live in an environment where it is harder for children to grow up fat, which means making the easy choice the healthy choice. Namely, make unhealthy food more expensive, get rid of soda vending machines in schools and make smaller portion sizes the norm, rather than having a mini-sized ice cream blast come in at over 500 calories. I support warning labels on soda, soda taxes, "added sugar" labels and bans on advertising to children. I know some of these opinions are unpopular, but it’s not simply about discipline. I don't say that because I don’t thinking “blaming” overweight individuals for being overweight is counterproductive, but because of the convincing evolutionary and biochemical explanation: we are genetically programmed to be rewarded by high-fat and high-sugar foods, so having to constantly resist such foods is fighting our innate desires. And in response to stress, our natural reaction is to reach for highly caloric, highly palatable food. Again, I’m comforted in the science: evolutionarily, as hunters and gatherers we wanted calorically dense foods at a time when we didn’t know when our next meal would come. So we still have the chemical pathways that send stress signals from our brain to our fat cells to store fat more easily.

I hope I can now be a name and a face to think of the next time you reduce someone’s story to a nothing more than that of a “fat person.” Love or hate Chris Christie, just don’t belittle his life story down to a “but he’s fat” remark. I want to cry when people say “It’s as simple as addition and subtraction” or “All you have to do is close your mouth.” When I heard people say this, it never made losing weight easier. It just made me hate myself more. It made me internalize that there had to be something wrong with me because it was supposed to be so simple. Part of what helped me actually recover from my self-hatred and weight loss obsession was learning about the science of how difficult losing weight really is.

I wish everyone knew that stigmatizing overweight or “fat” people does not “help” or motivate that person to change. Love and appreciation for everyone for all the wonderful and different sizes that people come in helps. The most scientific definition I can give beauty is healthy. And what’s healthy is focusing on a diet full of what feels good to eat and one in which you don’t feel deprived, and don’t get upset about numbers and measurements that may not be the best fit for you.

Am I there yet? Certainly not. Do I feel really good about where I am anyway? Yes. Proof? I bought jeans for the first time in five years, even though my BMI remains in the “overweight” category.

Women: A Tirade

Here are some stories, reflections, quotes and experiences I’ve had which have caused me to reflect on the state of women abroad and in America. Since learning what a feminist is, namely someone who believes in the equality of men and women, I’ve identified as one and since opened my eyes to a world of sexism, misogyny and discrimination. My bones are chilled and my heart is heavy.    

Feminism is believing that men and women are equal (see Emma Watson’s lovely U.N. speech on the subject here).  The problem worldwide is not necessarily the black-and-white idea that men and women are not equal. It’s not as simple as women know they are oppressed and are trying to break free. There’s a barrier of culture, tradition and expectation that makes the idea of equally valuing human female life revolutionary. (See female feticide rates in India or in China or just the contrast in male vs. female literacy rates by country).

 Human trafficking is just one of the many abuses against women worldwide, and often starts out less dramatically than in Taken. Women are simply sold by family members or lured to foreign countries by the prospect of jobs such as working as maids, but are instead forced into brothels where they are beaten for resisting (when that doesn’t work, perpetrators will get girls addicted to drugs). Often this takes place in countries where they do not speak the language, where they are not allowed to leave their dwelling, and where no one helps them because prostitution is so stigmatized.

More offensive, degrading practices towards women:

• Kidnapping and raping a woman who refuses to marry you to strip her of her honor in Ethiopia
• Exchanging a bride for her younger sister when her hymen doesn’t break on her wedding in Afghanistan (My source here is actually my aesthetician is from Afghanistan and knows somebody who this happened to!)
• Moral police in Iran taking you to court for being seen in public without a male relative to chaperone,
• Publically stoning a 13 or 14-year old girl to death for refusing to marry a Shabab commander in Somalia
• A husband killing his wife in Pakistan so he could marry another woman
• Acid attacks permanently scarring women’s faces in Colombia, sometimes simply for breaking off a relationship

Meena is an Indian kidnapped and trafficked into a brothel at 8- or 9-years old in Bihar, India profiled by Kristof and WuDunn. She was beaten into submission before spending years in the brothel, where she had two children that the owners had taken as hostages so that Meena couldn’t leave. Even though police officers were frequent customers and serviced for free, Meena took a chance and ran away to a police station hoping that they might take mercy on her. The officers sent her back.

My Firsthand Experiences

Seven years before I became aware of feminism, I went to Egypt with my family to visit family. I was 12. I didn’t know about culturally appropriate dress or the expected role of a woman in conservative Middle Eastern countries. I noticed women staring, but at that time I couldn’t make sense of why they would cover themselves up in this hot weather. I knew it was for religious purposes, but having grown up secularly I saw no reason to dress so modestly. 

It was a busy marketplace in Cairo, filled with jewelry vendors and children selling trinkets and toys. The humidity turned my straightened hair curly again. My attire of a tank top and Soffe shorts was weather-appropriate.

A man grabbed my behind. Among the rushing, the crowds, and all the veiled faces, it was impossible to even know which direction to look. I was too stunned to act so I just stopped and looked at all the possible perpetrators… I noticed one man who was walking just a little bit too fast. Had I even been sure, I had no idea how to act.

I wish I did. I wish I knew what I know now. The appropriate action would have been to shame that man: to yell, to point, to express my disgust in anger so such acts aren’t “allowed” to happen. But I was too shocked, too surprised, too taken off-guard, too unsure if I felt what I think I really just felt.

I wish I knew Gabrielle then: my roommate in India. When she was groped at a crowded Indian festival she turned around and immediately punched him in the face. She describes his shocked and unexpected face as priceless. (I wish I saw it.) It’s the official protocol for more moments I hope I never find myself in.

I did, however, get to witness Gabrielle in action on another occasion. We once went out to ice cream Hauz Khas in Delhi, India when a man with a group of friends passed us and pinched her behind. My friend, knowing exactly what to do, immediately yelled “Hey! What the hell was that?! Don’t touch me, you—” “Sorry,” the man turned around smiling with his hands on his ears. (In India it is common to place your hands on your ears when apologizing).

Smiling. Flirtatiously. Smirking as if he knew she didn’t really mean what she said. Even though she was yelling, she really welcomed the invasion of privacy, the implication that she was not a person enough to decide who makes choices about her body.

But more terrible than watching it happen to someone else is watching it happen to yourself. First, at the school I worked at in Bisada, India, when a group of (mostly male) students gathered around me and I yelled “SPACE” as I usually did when they started to overcrowd me; instead of the gradual dispersal of the crowd I felt a prod in my behind. And instead of reporting to the principal immediately, I yelled angrily at the mysterious student and hoped for it to die down because of course who wants their butt to be the subject of school news and a possible suspension? And of course I “let” the group of boys gather around me and I didn’t act quickly or sternly enough to control their behavior. A full-fledged feminist for three years at that point, I still managed to become my own victim in a classic victim-blaming scenario. Here, too, the desire to maintain privacy and forget embarrassing situations was strong. (And it was something that used to infuriate me in the past: reading about women’s stories of rape or sexual violence, I always wished, above all, that they took action against their perpetrators who deserved punishment or public shaming). I did take action, but after the school expelled the student they retracted the expulsion when he threatened the school with gang violence. By this point, the whole school knew about the incident. And another generation of students were taught that violating a woman was not a serious matter, for some simple threatening could get you out of any real trouble.

In India, parents didn’t consistently rejoice for their daughters the way they rejoice for sons. I saw this firsthand in Bisada, a rural village about a 45-minute motorbike ride away from Delhi. One of our teachers left school to take care of her “second child.” In attending the celebration of her birth, I learned that Anju ma’am had not actually given birth to her child, but had taken her sister’s daughter because her sister didn’t want to keep the girl. They had a pre-arranged agreement that only if a boy were born would the sister keep the baby.

By the time this baby shower happened, the gender selection wasn’t even shocking to me. I saw it everyday in the classroom. My school had students from kindergarten to 10th grade, and as the class got higher (and fees became more expensive), you saw less and less females. All of the students who could “afford” cell phones happened to be males. Families spent more on males because they were simply worth more in their eyes. Girls weren’t worth the extra tuition, the extra milk, the cost of an extra vaccine…

Girls were valued too little to be trusted with decisions like who they should marry or what, or who, happens to their bodies. Females needed to be taught a lesson for going out late with a man who is not family, as five men “taught” Jyoti Singh in December of 2012.

The Most Recent, Well-Documented & Publicized Atrocious Rape in India

Jyoti was a medical student from a poor village. She was a harbinger of hope for the impoverished family, working diligently so that she could support them one day. Early on and contrary to Indian tradition, she told her parents to put the fees saved for her wedding towards her tuition instead.

Before she was able to practice physiotherapy however, she was sexually violated and brutalized when she went to see Life of Pi with a male friend of hers. In what is now known as the infamous 2012 Delhi gang rape, five men took turns raping Jyoti and pulling out her intestines before she died days later in a Singaporean hospital.

I watched Leslee Udwin interview these men and their lawyers in her BBC documentary India’s Daughter when it came out in March 2015. I had just returned from India at this point. Outraged and impassioned by the film, I could not even discuss it with my friends in Delhi. They were unable to watch it because the Indian government banned it because it could “threaten public order.”

Horrible India’s Daughter Quotes

“[Rape’s] just like that kind of action. Beat him. Put his hand forcefully inside.” – M. L Sharma, one of the rapists’ defense lawyers.

“If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.” – AP Singh, another of the rapists’ defense lawyers.

“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.” — Mukesh, one of the convicted rapists.

Short American Rant

Whether you live in India or any other country in the world, don’t take girls for granted. In America, we still have an unacceptable gender pay gap, and abysmal rates of reporting rape and convicting rapists. Need I remind readers that a six-term member of Congress, Todd Akin, argued that women that were raped had a mechanism for somehow blocking the unwanted pregnancy? Or the Steubenville case, in which two teenage football players raped an unconscious young woman, posted the video on social media, and then pleaded the girl not to press charges so that his football career would not be damaged.  Most recently, adult film star Stoya accused James Deen of raping her despite her clearly telling him “no, stop, [and] used my safeword.”  In a refreshingly positive light, the porn industry quickly believed the accusations and dropped him as a performer. From that same article, I like this segment, helping us to understand what kind of women are often victimized and why:

Part of the reason that rape is hard to prove is that sexist fairytales about what constitutes consent infect judges and juries just as much as the general public. Of the many myths about sexual violence, the most pernicious is that women routinely lie about it. That’s not true; the rates of false reporting for rape and sexual assault are estimated to be around the same as rates of false reporting for any other crime – the current figure is anywhere between 0.2% and 8%. Men are actually more likely to be victims of rape themselves than they are to be falsely accused of it.

Rapists rely on these myths, often targeting women and girls who they know will be too scared to come forward, or who will not be believed. That means women of color, young girls, and sex workers. Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw is currently on trial for allegedly stalking and raping 13 black women and girls, some of whom had previous arrest records for sex work. Serial rapists target the young, the vulnerable and sex workers, knowing how hard it is even for women deemed ‘respectable’ to be taken seriously.

But Most Importantly, Hope Lies in the Proles…

Change starts with you. Believing someone who has confided in you, or gone public wither story, is something small you can do to make this world a more gender-equal and less hostile place to be a woman.   

My suggestions: 

1. Be an informed citizen. Make sure all your friends know about what a terrible problem gender inequality is, especially in the developing world but also in America. Change cannot happen before awareness does. This includes pressuring, or pressurizing as they say in India, politicians to care more about these issues. As Kristof wrote in Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunities for Women Worldwide, “When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers.” Let’s make sure our government knows we care about women’s rights and safety because the U.S. government isn’t doing enough and won’t until we all demand it. (Namely: that guard telling Nicholas Kristof that he prioritizes trafficked DVDs over women because American companies have a larger stake in pirated cinema).  The CARE Action Network (www.can.care.org), can assist you in “speaking out, educating policy makers, and underscoring that the public wants against poverty and injustice.”
2. Know that your words matter. They are important and shape culture. Sexist language makes sexism more real. Don’t say “you hit like a girl” or “don’t be a girl.” Think about why women “lose” their virginity yet men “take” someone’s virginity. Anything which demeans, degrades or dehumanize women makes it easier to devalue or violate them.
3. Laugh so you don’t cry. Watch John Oliver covering women’s issues here or here.

Suggestions from Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, taken from Half the Sky – all of which can be done in the next four minutes:

1. Open an account and www.globalgiving.org and support a grassroots project that focuses on education (which allows a woman better job opportunities, rather than only sex work and the stigma or sexually transmitted diseases that comes with it) or www.kiva.org, where you can support women to start their own business and earn an income independently, again without having to resort to brothel work.
2. Sponsor a girl or a woman through Plan International, Women for Women International, World Vision, or American Jewish World Service. You can exchange letters with your sponsors and even visit them, as Kristof & WuDunn have in the Philippines, Sudan, and the Dominican Republic.
3. Sign up for e-mail updates on www.womensnews.org or www.worldpulse.com, which distribute information about abuses of women and sometimes advise actions that readers can take to help these women.

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Sarah is a lover of words, foreign films and gastronomic delights. She currently resides in New Jersey, where she is making the most of her gap year before continuing her education. Follow her on Twitter.

Greetings from Liberty City

Last summer I decided to get a Steam account. I don’t have much of an interest in video games, but when I was around 11, my brother Wil and I would spend hours taking turns playing Grand Theft Auto III, with one of us playing the game and the other one keeping an eye out for our mother coming into the basement. Against her knowledge, our cousin LJ let us keep his copy of the game after he completed it, and we always told her we were playing some Tony Hawk game.

Wil and I never really made an effort to do any of the story missions of GTA III; mostly we just drove around, blew up cars, and shot people so we could get a wanted level and flee the cops. We also tried to get hookers into our cars to hang out with them. We named the white lady prostitute Charlotte and the black one Cleopatra. Other characters had names, too, but I don’t remember most of them anymore. When Player 1 got either wasted or busted, it was Player 2’s turn.

We were virtual gangsters. For me, it was a way to escape the world of fear and distrust I was growing accustomed to with divorced parents having new significant others whom I hated but couldn’t do anything about, changing schools, pets and grandparents always dropping dead, and puberty ruining my once rockin’ hot kid body. It was almost magical to be Claude Speed, have the freedom to drive around Liberty City as we pleased, and not care about what these little video game people thought about us because they didn’t exist — and neither did we.

I find it interesting that Grand Theft Auto has come into my life when I am again asking the questions I started to ask at 11 — is this worth it? Is life worth all the letdowns? Who can I really trust? Do they like me or are they just pretending they do? I downloaded GTA III and GTA: Vice City one night after work because I couldn’t stand to watch anymore Netflix in my leisure time. It became too draining to watch a film and wonder if that’ll ever be my name in the credits or think about how many years of story ideas will be rejected before one might evolve into something. It even became a drag to talk about movies, since most conversations with people regarding film last two minutes and only cover what was good or funny or shocking. Which is fine; you can’t have in-depth conversations with everyone. But to think about how writers and artists slave away creating passion projects that to so many people will only be awkward icebreaker discussions before they move onto discussing startups and that time they did shrooms in college can turn wide-eyed ambitions into cold realities. I wasn’t giving up on my love for movies, but was instead putting it on a backburner until it didn’t make me want to vomit so much. 

If you are unfamiliar with the Grand Theft Auto franchise, there are only a few basic things that you need to know. The games take place in fictionalized cities in America — Liberty City is a version of New York, Vice City is Miami, and San Andreas is meant to be a combination of Los Angeles and the surrounding deserts. Often the protagonist is a man who has just gotten out of jail and is trying to work his way back up into the crime world. You get to steal cars, and sometimes boats and helicopters. You can kill people and take their money. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

I decided that when I bought the two games, I didn’t want to just idly drive around as I had done in the past — I wanted to play. During my recent 97 hours of play on the two early Grand Theft Auto games, I have realized some things about life that will leave a lasting impression.

Lesson 1: Be Cool

There is no shame in being late to the party when it comes to enjoying anything after it stops being new. Just because Breaking Bad has ended doesn’t mean that the show is anything less without the craze. The Wizard of Oz will turn 77 this year, but its message will always be universal. So why do we throw away video games once their graphics look dated? We still listen to songs after we’ve memorized the lyrics like the alphabet — so why do we toss video games to the side after we’re done playing? Playing a game when everyone else has moved onto its bigger and fancier successor is an under-appreciated experience — so cherish it when you can.

With that being said, be weary that “cool” varies as you age. For example, as an 11-year-old, I thought it was badass to pick up hookers, take them to a remote area, and watch the car bounce up and down, implying that the two in the car are banging (even though if you zoomed in you could see the two characters just sitting there). It’s cool to make two characters bone when you are only 11 and have a limited knowledge of what sex is other than “this goes into that.” But as you get older, if that is your definition of “cool” and you are not going out into the world and having consensual sex with real people, you will never be cool. Those are just facts.

Lesson 2: Speed Isn’t Always the Key to Success

Throughout both games there are numerous timed missions that are designed to be accomplished only in the final seconds. It’s easy to make the mistake of going fast in order to beat the clock, but relying on speed can prevent you from having the time to avoid obstacles that get in the way. For example, in Vice City, I often like to have the protagonist, Tommy Vercetti, drive a motorcycle. But in a mission where you are chasing the cartel or trying to lose the police, if you hit another car or run into a building, you will fly off the motorcycle and it will take even more time to complete. How does this apply to real life? Say you are running away from a serial killer. But you are running so fast that you don’t see the sidewalk has ended and so you trip into the street. It will take some time to stand up, address the situation, put pressure on your wounds, and find out where to run next, and before you know it, he has hacked you to death because you weren’t fast enough.

Lesson 3: Cheating Is a Necessary Evil Full of Consequences

I am not sure how players are expected to play GTA III or Vice City without cheats. One of the reasons I have not gotten obsessed with San Andreas is that the cheat codes on Steam are random letters jumbled together. For example, if you want weapons in GTA III, you simply type: “gunsgunsguns” onto your keyboard, and you have the entire set of weapons offered for the game. In Vice City, you can choose from “thugstools,” “professionaltools,” or “nuttertools.” I always go for “nuttertools” because you get a chainsaw. In San Andreas, however, the weapon cheats are either: “UZUMYMW,” “WANRLTW,” or “KJKSZPJ.” Maybe there is some sort of logic in these three cheats, but here’s the thing, I’m not an autistic genius who can crack codes in less than two seconds.

Cheats do make gameplay easier, but beware: in an excessive amount you can prevent yourself from winning. Not because “oh, but it’s against the morals of the game, you didn’t really win,” but rather, enough cheats can corrupt a file and make it unreadable to your computer. I learned this the hard way with Vice City. I had just completed a particularly difficult mission halfway through the game where you had to outrace this one driver, and I was super excited. I went downstairs for dinner and when I came back, Steam would not let me open the file, as there had been an unexpected hold. It was truly devastating, but a lesson well-learned. Sure, cheats will get you somewhere faster, but the aftermath if caught is severe.

Lesson 4: You Will Make Enemies

The closer you get towards finishing a game altogether, the more enemies you will have. You will have gained respect among your peers and have earned a boatload of money, but you will have pissed off others in the process. Life is a competition, and you can’t make everybody happy. You shouldn’t go out of your way to piss people off, but don’t pass by opportunities because you are afraid of who will hate you. (This is all assuming you are a good person with good intentions. If you are reading this and think that I am deeming it acceptable to exterminate a race of people or blow up abortion clinics, then you are drastically misinterpreting what I am saying.)

This aside, it is important to take into consideration what you will lose if you do become successful. Barack Obama is probably pretty grateful that he is the President of the United States, but he can’t go to a Starbucks by himself without getting bombarded by soccer moms who think he is just the bee’s knees. There are certain places in both Liberty City and Vice City that you can’t get to after you complete a certain mission because you kill too many of the mafia or cartel’s buddies and if you set foot in their territory, people will shoot you from many different angles and you will likely die.

Lesson 5: It’s All Just a Game

After I completed first Vice City and then GTA III, the high ended like air being slowly released from a balloon. There was so much hype towards finishing, and then when it happened, I was left there thinking, “Is this it?” The journey was fun. I liked getting to drive around the beach with ‘80s music on the radio and Ray Liotta’s voice mocking the people Tommy runs over. I liked unlocking the new neighborhoods I had never seen before in in GTA III. I enjoyed completing the missions, sometimes on one try and sometimes after dozens, and ultimately feeling like I had accomplished something great, though in reality, thousands of others had done this before me. It was my journey, and no one else’s. I didn’t care how long it took to get there. But when it was over, I just found myself driving around and shooting hookers, like I had been doing in the first place so many years ago.

I ask myself what’s the point of playing if eventually I’ll just wind up doing what I already had been doing. I suppose it’s kind of like asking yourself why bother to get potty-trained if you’ll just wind back up in a diaper in old age — there are a few decades in between where you’d benefit from not peeing your pants every day. Grand Theft Auto taught me that the journey is worth taking, even if the desired destination will be disappointing. 

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Rachel Petzinger is a comedian. She has since moved onto other games, such as L4D2 and Half-Life. You can follow her on Twitter @chelpetz.

The Importance of Listeners

When I’m in a conversation with a group, I listen intently. As each person expresses their personal opinion on whatever topic we’re discussing, I settle into their shoes. When people ask me “What do you think?” I stumble. Have I not been talking? Despite my silence, I believe I’ve been actively participating the whole time.

This happens to me a lot. I don’t know why but I much prefer listening than I do talking. More recently, I’ve started to ask myself whether this is a flaw or a strength. Especially in the entertainment industry, women who want to lead need to showcase their strength and prove that they can lead. How can I be a leader if I appear mute?

Starting at a very young age, I was fascinated by the art of storytelling, and often more interested in how a story was told than the actual story itself. I took note of all the movies I had seen that told the exact same story but had different titles. In an attempt to tell my own story, I started exploring my world through the lens of a camcorder I had been gifted for Christmas when I was eight, chronicling my life as an only child with a dog and two French parents in the city of Miami.

I believed I was passionate, always lugging my camcorder everywhere we went and meticulously writing down what events I had captured on each DV tape. Every playdate became about dressing up and taking on a role for Parallel Pictures, a production company founded by my 8-year-old self and presented by my friend Christina holding up two index fingers symbolizing the parallel lines. Similar to the MGM opening with the roaring lion, I’d film my dog looking up at a treat and jumping out of frame to catch it.

As an only child, my world was dense with imagination and curiosity that was satiated with film. I didn’t feel alone or quiet with it. I knew I wanted to pursue a life in the arts and I applied Early Decision to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for a degree in Film & Television Production.

On my first day there, our professor asked the class who wanted to be a Director. This was a difficult question for me to answer. As I thought about it, I started to hear the hands of my peers shoot up and looking around, nearly everyone had raised their hand. I also observed how all those hands belonged to men. Surely, it was a bold question to ask in the beginning of our formal education, but it was worth asking myself: Why don’t I want to direct?

Throughout my time at NYU, I was constantly reminded of the glaring indicator about women in Hollywood. If I have no interest in directing, am I only contributing to the statistic? In 2015, women comprised 17% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 (domestic) grossing films. This is the same percentage of women working in these roles in 1998.

After roughly three years of classes and working on set, I realized that I was finding my place in producing: the art of putting all of the elements together to make the film happen. Producers are essentially the behind-the-scenes magic that allows for the Director’s vision to get translated. Still, as a Producer, am I only facilitating the vision that men have by doing the “grunt work”? Am I submitting or am I transcending? Do I need to pave my way as a female Director to prove that I’m a modern woman? If I’m not talking, should I feel bad that I’m quiet?

During my junior year, one of my best friends from the program, Jake Fertig, approached me about an autobiographical feature he wanted to make called Howeds. He was one of the people who had first raised their hand when asked, “Who wants to direct?”

The story was about his adolescence, growing up in a New Jersey suburb where the characters had grown into drinking, dealing drugs, spouting off misogynistic taunts, and committing recreational misdemeanors for thrill.  Despite having a dissimilar adolescence, I was drawn to the clutter of ideas. I wanted to help consolidate these ideas and develop treatments that would reflect a realistic production schedule and timeline.

Shortly afterwards, Jake and I started dating. It made things easier and more complicated at the same time. When it came to drafting the script, Jake asked me if I was interested in co-writing and producing the film and without hesitating, I said yes. Why? Was it because I felt I needed to say yes?

Surely, I had the subliminal pressure to be involved in the work that my new partner was so deeply invested in. Still, I recognized this was a real opportunity to represent the female voice within a heavily male-dominated story and to use everything I had learned from producing. I wanted to prove that I could be a powerhouse despite the assumption that I’m only helping because I’m the “girlfriend”.

Recently, Producers have started to get more acknowledgement for their work in film. Veterans like Kathleen Kennedy, a Producer of the new Star Wars film, and newcomers like Megan Ellison, the Producer behind two of the 2013 Best Picture nominees are finally starting to become a part of the conversation. Typically, the Director is in the spotlight but without the Producer, the spotlight can’t be turned on because the stage hasn’t been booked and the lights haven’t been rented and the grips haven’t been hired to turn it on. Even with all of the logistical elements, a Producer is not just the business partner, but the creative and practical—The Director dumps visions and the Producer mediates the execution.

We split principal photography for Howeds into four parts, knowing it would be easier to request the cast and crew to take a week off work as opposed to thirty consecutive days while working unpaid. On a set where people are working unpaid, the resources are low but the expectations are naturally higher because they are not being properly compensated. Simple gestures like lending out hand warmers or serving hot tea in cold temperatures isn’t generous, it’s expected. There are constant production issues that come in the way of being able to have a creative eye on a project I co-wrote. Jake and the Director of Photography, Chris Fox, are constantly asking me to watch the monitor for notes on the scene, but I am busy juggling the vegan’s alternative meal while figuring out how to pick up another cast member from the bus station without an additional car.

And still, despite all of this, everyone is respectful to the Director, who has the responsibility of creating an artistic vision and should not be bogged down with any production issues that are going on behind the scenes, but not necessarily the Producer, who they believe is putting them through these conditions as opposed to protecting them. The Producer also has the responsibility of shielding the Director by tackling all of the questions, concerns, and often, personal dilemmas that a particular cast/crew member is going through. They have given the promise to do everything in their power to make everyone’s experience on the production as positive as possible. Although everyone can see the hard work that the Director exerts, it is often hard for cast and crew to understand all of the work that the Producer has done to make it all possible.

We are naturally more interested in those who appear busy and those we are told not to bother. We assume that they are of a higher status than us and assume our inferiority in that environment. In Hollywood, the Director and Producer are those people. They are the reason that the film is getting made. Some perceive that the Producer is just the moneylender and the Director is the one getting his/her hands dirty on set, slaving away at the creation. In some productions, that’s certainly true.

However, on independent and low-budgeted sets like Howeds, both the Director and the Producer are slaving away, which makes it very easy to feel overlooked and unacknowledged as a Producer. We end up feeling bad, and like we should devalue the role. If I’m being treated like this, then maybe it’s because the role is not important enough. It also confirms the fear that female Producers are contributing to the glaring absence of women in the industry. Even as I type this, Microsoft Word keeps autocorrecting director to Director and doesn’t change Producer when I use a lowercase “p”.

If the conversation is a film, then the Director is talking and the Producer is listening. Do listeners matter? The answer is yes because we can’t have a conversation without them.

Although the Producer’s main responsibility is assembling all of the elements of the set to make the film happen, I believe a Producer should also be creative. If the Director is asking the Producer to help visualize their idea, they should be able to see it and execute it. As a writer on the film, I tackle both the creative and administrative. On set, I’m asked to delineate production tasks so that I’m able to stand behind the monitor and assist in directing. Here, I’m listening. I’m listening to the actors and watching the scene play out. When the rehearsal is over, I take Jake aside and give him my notes.

On one of the last days of class, a professor asked us who still wanted to direct. Only a handful of people now raised their hand, Jake confidently among the group. I’m looking forward to when they’ll start asking students “And, who wants to be a Producer?” I’ll confidently raise my hand.

I’m thankful that we live in a country where Directors and Producers of all genders have paved a road for us and that I have peers who make way for those kind of pioneers for future generations. We aren’t there yet, though, and we need to continue having the conversation. More importantly, we need people to know it’s okay to listen.

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Emily is a producer for the independent production company, Perestroika, and a Field PA at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. She graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and in her spare time, she likes to stop dogs on the street, watch movies she doesn't fully understand, and hang with her loved ones. Follow her on Twitter @emdalmas.

7 Crucial Lessons from Unsolved Mysteries

There’s a joke in my family that I was only made aware of recently, and it’s that I am going to wind up being like one of the sons from Step Brothers. Living with my parents well into my thirties. Unemployed. No car. Not married. The list goes on. My brother Willy P probably told the joke to my mother and she probably laughed because she thinks it’s true. Right now, at least, I think she thinks it could happen. In addition to freelancing and working in retail, I am looking for that ever-holy full-time job. And when it comes, glory will be upon us. Yet for now, everyday I must convince Mother, “Yes, I applied to many jobs today. Yes, I reached out to people on LinkedIn. No, Mother, I can’t apply to that job, I can’t afford a car. There’s only $80 in my bank account, $37,000 of which belong to my student loans.”

Sometimes I watch Full House at night. It’s not a great show, but I remember it being on in the background when I was very little – maybe three years old. Then, when I was in middle school and had the house to myself before anyone came home, I would eat a ham and cheese Hot Pocket and watch reruns. Now whenever I watch an episode I always have my computer next to me, convinced that as long as Final Draft is opened, I am still writing.

I feel like a disappointment to my parents and a broken record to my friends – I mean, how many times can you make a joke about having no money? As much as we need comedy to relieve pain and forget our woes, hearing the same joke over and over again becomes depressing. There are only so many times you can chuckle about Uncle Jesse’s hair or Kimmy Gibbler’s feet until you feel like you’re trapped in a mental institution.

So instead of remembering the good old days through corny sitcoms, occasionally I will turn to Unsolved Mysteries and visit the stories that scared me in my younger days, and to be honest, still do. That’s the thing about comedy – there’s a setup, and then a punch line, and not much else left to the imagination. But with mysteries, the story is never over until it is officially solved. When I get creeped out by something that had the same effect on me ten years ago, it’s almost like time has never changed.

For those of you who were not fortunate enough to be brought up by the school of Robert Stack, Unsolved Mysteries ran from 1987 – 2001 and brought to life the disturbing stories you heard on the news. It terrified even the most skeptic of viewers, and the opening theme certainly didn’t help. I still suffer post-traumatic stress when I hear the music followed by Stack’s spine-chilling narration reminding us that we might be able to help solve a mystery.

The show was extremely successful in finding criminals and reuniting families with their lost loved ones, or at least bringing some sort of closure involving a missing person’s whereabouts. And what separates this show from the copycats on Investigation Discovery and similar networks is that Unsolved Mysteries actually seemed dedicated to helping victims and families. What is on TV today is edited so heavily with campy special effects and overly dramatic narration and performances that it appears to be purely for entertainment, making a melodrama out of unfortunately real events. Whereas Unsolved Mysteries told the facts without flair, what you see today are basically TV movies in disguise – they have the actors smiling sinisterly into the cameras breaking the fourth wall, and each commercial break ends in some dramatic tune. Unsolved Mysteries treated each episode like a mini-documentary usually no longer than ten minutes. They interviewed eye-witnesses and loved ones and gave all sides of a story, so although they claimed at the beginning that the show “wasn’t a news broadcast,” it kind of was one, but with Robert Stack’s charm. Today, stories that would have taken Unsolved Mysteries eight minutes to tell take an hour, presumably so that networks can make advertisement money, but by the time you’re on the third commercial, you’ve already said “Screw this,” and have looked up what ultimately happened on your phone. It takes you out of the story, in contrast to how Unsolved Mysteries dragged you in and chained you to your chair. Today’s shows have no intention of bringing justice to families. They are only interested in making a profit off slightly titillating stories that happened to average people.

Coming home from school on half-days when the show was on Lifetime and being scared out of my wits, Unsolved Mysteries taught me many lessons that have shaped how I approach life, which I would like to share with you:

1. Don't use an ATM at night

There was one case about a young man named Matthew Chase who disappeared after going to an ATM to deposit a check from work. Records show that he was able to make it to the machine, but that he had attempted to take out a large sum of cash. Authorities thought this was suspicious, and when they looked at the video footage of him at the bank making the transaction, there was a man standing inches away from him. They believe that this man was Chase’s killer, and that Chase was requesting such a large amount to alert the bank of his situation. His body was discovered weeks later and his killer has never been found. This case always scared me because of what a sucky situation it was – he only had an hour left to deposit that check; that’s why he left in the middle of the night to do it. So by waiting until the last minute but also not wanting to get murdered, you risk not having any cash money. I saw this episode long before I was depositing checks, so what stuck out to me the most was how vital it is to be aware of your surroundings. One time when we were little, Willy P and I were staying at our dad’s house and we decided to walk to the corner store to get some Stewart’s. I noticed out of the corner of my eye a truck following us, but didn’t think anything of it. Allentown, NJ is one of those towns where once an out-of-towner enters, they get lost, even though it’s really just one road. I think some people get confused and think they are in Allentown, PA. That’s why I didn’t think anything of it. Then as we walked out of the store and back to our house, I noticed the truck slowly following us from behind again, stopping whenever I glanced at the driver. I said something to my brother, who at the time was still puny and eye-level with me. He got out one of the root beer bottles to use as a weapon, and even though this guy probably could have had at least had a knife or gun, he drove away. I always figured that because we were aware of his presence, we may have scared him off. Instead of going home, we went to our neighbor Pat’s house, so that if he were following us and wanted to kidnap or murder us, Pat would be the decoy. She and her boyfriend were both twice the size of us – maybe even three times, and instead of kids they just had a stupid St. Bernard that was born on September 11, 2001 and barked all the time and always got into our house somehow. It wouldn’t have been a big loss. Being aware of our surroundings definitely paid off, since we weren’t killed, and that was owed in part to Unsolved Mysteries.

2. Don't partake in fighting with strangers

One major lesson I learned from Unsolved Mysteries is to not fight with strangers unless absolutely necessary. You don’t know what they are capable of and most of the time what you are fighting over is not worth it. A sad example that comes to mind is the “Texas Most Wanted” episode, which also happened to be Matthew McConaughey’s first onscreen performance ever. He is ripped in it. So hot and so much Texas. Anyway, this episode always stuck with me not only because of how disturbing it is, but it was the first time I experienced a blacked-out face – you know, when someone wants to be anonymous so they are interviewed in silhouette. This scared the hell out of 13-year-old Rachel, but I’ll elaborate on this in my following bullet point. In this episode, McConaughey plays Larry Dickens, a father who witnesses a man (real name is Edward Bell) masturbating in front of children playing in the street. He chases the guy away from the kids while his mother calls the police – but then Dickens steals his keys to try to keep him there. Bell then shoots Dickens, Dickens stumbles into his garage where Bell follows him. His mother leaves him (with the garage door opened!) to call an ambulance, and Bell returns with a rifle to finish the job. We are reminded how unpredictable strangers can be, and when avoidable, we should leave dangerous people to the professionals. Like when I am at work and a difficult, uneducated, crack-head hillbilly excuse of a woman yells at me that I am being rude for asking her to not sit on the stairs, which I only ask her not to do because I don’t want little kids to fall over her and lose their teeth as it looks is what happened to her, I let Rockefeller security know of the situation because they got my back and we have a secret handshake and they most likely are better at fighting crazies than I am.

A similar case detailed a woman who was on her way to work and behind a truck that was swerving and acting obnoxious. If someone on the road is being aggressive, try your best to avoid him or her. Very few things in this world are worth taking a bullet for, and getting to work on time is not one of them. When the woman tried to pass him, the driver blocked the road, got out of his car and shot her. The woman asked to remain anonymous, but somehow online I found out her name was Janice Katilius. I think other news sources at the time may have used her real name. I checked up on her. I like to check up on these people sometimes, make sure they’re doing okay. I act as a silent guardian, watching over them via social media and keeping them out of danger without them knowing. According to Facebook, Janice is doing well.

3. Do face your fears, no matter how dumb they are

The anonymous faces freak me out – especially if the person alters his or her voice to protect their identity and uses a really dumb fake name like “John.” I can’t explain one hundred percent why this creeps me out. When I first saw one of these interviews in the segment aforementioned, I was paralyzed the whole day, like I had seen a ghost myself. We had a half-day at school and I was home alone, so I called my mom, and she goes: “Let me get this straight. You heard a story about a guy jerking off in the street in front of little children, who then murders an innocent man trying to stop him, and you’re afraid that someone hid their face during an interview? I’m working right now. I’ll see you at 6.” For me, it goes back to this psychological fear that what you can’t identify is threatening. I could write an entire memoir about my anonymous-face-phobia, but I will say my fear was slightly put to bed – maybe tucked in but not put all the way to sleep – when I was reading about this one case, the Las Cruces Bowling Alley Massacre. In 1990 at a bowling alley in Las Cruces, New Mexico, four people were murdered at gunpoint and three others were injured. One victim “Ida,” was interviewed anonymously, but in an interview revisiting the tragedy 20 years later, she showed her face. It was interesting to see the face behind the silhouette, but was also rewarding to see how she has been able to move on by the seemingly small act of revealing her identity. 

4. Don't communicate with ghosts because they don't play by human rules

If something doesn’t feel right, don’t do it, especially if ghosts or demons are involved. Spiritual entities don’t play by human rules. In my opinion, the scariest paranormal case the show ever profiled was called “Tallman’s Ghost,” where a family was haunted by a demonic presence after purchasing a bunk-bed. Their kids kept getting sick, things kept getting moved, and everyone kept envisioning the house catching on fire and the family being murdered. It became so unbearable to live there that they had to move out. Now, there may be very little you can do about a haunted house or buying something that you don’t know has a negative energy to it. But if something doesn’t feel right, always trust your gut, because it will only get worse the longer you wait. For example, my dad’s house is haunted. I’ve never actually seen anything while I was wide-awake, but before my stepmother came in and started touching all my stuff without permission, my belongings were always getting moved around. In the middle of the night I can hear footsteps when I can also hear everyone snoring. My brother claims that once a door slammed right in front of him for no reason – which I believe because that entire night he wouldn’t leave my side, when normally he calls me names like “Retard with an NYU degree” and “500 pounds of bird shit” and goes his own way. Then early one morning, a woman was in my bedroom asking me if I was waking up. I told her I was going to go back to bed. A few hours later I yelled at my stepmother for being in my room, but then I realized the woman I was talking to looked nothing like her. The same thing happened a few months later when I was home sick with bronchitis. Now whenever I’m there, my bed always shakes at 1 in the morning. It doesn’t feel like it’s threatening me, but it doesn’t feel welcoming, either. There’s not really much I can do about it, since I didn’t buy a haunted bunk-bed or anything, but I do my best not to engage and simply ask to be left alone. Sometimes it works. If anything, it has really given me a liking to sleeping in the same bed as someone else, that way I don’t feel as on my own. 

5. Don't hitchhike or pick up hitchhikers

Unfortunately, the United States isn’t Sweden or Norway where everyone is happy and trustworthy. We don’t have free healthcare or education and people are generally a lot more enthusiastic about killing strangers. It seems pretty obvious not to get into the car of someone you do not know. But let’s say I’m in a really good mood, and that one day I miraculously have the money to own a car. Unsolved Mysteries taught me not to take a chance on that hitchhiker who has a really convincing story where he’s just got to make it to this one place really fast. In the segment profiling the murder of Dorothy Donovan, her son, Charles Holden had picked up a hitchhiker who claimed he needed to see his sister because she was giving birth. Holden agreed to give this man a ride, but when the stranger became violent and left the truck for a brief moment, Holden was able to speed away. As he was arriving home, he noticed the stranger lurking around his home. He then called the police and when they arrived, they found his mother stabbed to death. I was always curious in this case whether or not the killer (who in 2006 forensic evidence confirmed was a man named Gilbert Cannon) had stolen Holden’s wallet and knew of his address or had just by some bizarre coincidence broken into the same house. I could never find any information about the bizarre outcome other than that Cannon claimed he was high and went into her house because it was the only one he found without a light on. Either way, when you open your car door, you open yourself up to a world of weirdos.

6. Don't have an affair (but also don't live in a small town)

I’m not very good at dating, and I think part of that is because as a teenager, I was afraid the person I might date might have another significant other, who might get jealous and then might try to kill me. In the case of the “Circleville Letter Writer,” a woman named Mary Gillespie and other town residents of Circleville, Ohio began to receive threatening anonymous letters detailing their personal lives. Gillespie was targeted for allegedly having an affair with a school official (that was according to her, untrue). A booby-trap had been set up along her bus route, and after receiving a threatening phone call, her husband Ron stormed out of the house, only to be found dead in his car. Mary’s brother-in-law, Paul Freshour was accused of being the murderer because it was his gun used to set the booby-trap, though he maintained his innocence. When the letters continued to be sent while he was in solitary confinement, they finally released him. 

The writer sent a letter to Unsolved Mysteries when the segment first broadcasted in 1994, warning them not to get involved. People stopped receiving letters around the mid-‘90s, but Ron Gillespie is dead, Paul Freshour (recently deceased) spent ten years of his life in jail for a crime he was clearly not guilty of, and hundreds of people lived for decades in fear. Whether or not any of the allegations were actually true, this case always made me want to be a faithful girlfriend, in the event someone wanted to hold anything over my head. It also made me realize that in small towns people are way into others’ businesses and that’s not how I would like to raise my at-the-moment-non-existent children. 

7. Be smart about one-night-stands

Some of you are out there and having one-night-stands, but without Unsolved Mysteries, you might be unsafe. In the segment called “Burning Bed” (of no relation to the Farrah Fawcett made-for-TV-movie) we learn about Megan Curl, who was tied to her bed and set on fire by a man who she had brought back to her apartment after a night of dancing. As horrific as this incident was, it inspired me to come up with a checklist for bringing back a guest of any sort to my place of residence:

• Have I met this person more than once?
• Have I had more than two drinks & if I have, is this something I would do without two drinks?
• Are my roommates home?
• If I do not have roommates, does at least one person know my whereabouts? 
• Does this person seem weird? (Now, if everybody could answer this question correctly, no one would ever get murdered, but again, trust your gut.)
• Do I have an exit strategy if things go wrong?

Megan did have a neighbor-friend looking out for her, but sadly this was not enough. When dealing with strangers in your home, one can never be too cautious in taking the necessary steps to not being murdered. And not getting pregnant. And not getting AIDS. Use protection. If someone’s face makes you want to throw up when you are kissing it, it is okay to say no. It is also okay to never have sex. 

---

I owe my life to Unsolved Mysteries; without it, I may have been too cocky to partake in dangerous activities, and I maybe would have died prematurely or worse, have been stuck in an unhappy marriage living in the Midwest. Here I have some tidbits that I have gathered from multiple episodes, where I don’t have a personal anecdote for them at the moment, but my story is still yet to be written.

• Don’t become a prostitute; you can always just become a dancer.
• Don’t play with a Ouija board.
• Drugs, sex, and money are at the heart of many crimes so choose your actions wisely.
• We don’t have reason to be afraid of UFOs just yet, although Roswell is pretty scary.
• People can still be reunited and justice can still be served even when all hope is lost.

It seems kind of weird to be nostalgic about a show that profiles the darkness in humanity, but I think it’s a way to connect the past to the present and acknowledge that we are the same person all throughout our relatively short lives. The families who are missing loved ones never forget them, but they learn how to cope. The victims of murders are so much more than just what their final moments were – they were people who, like us, sometimes thought too long about whether they should make dinner or get takeout, or if a T-shirt could go one more day without being washed. And it helps me realize that the down-on-her-luck 23-year-old Rachel is still the awkward teenager who is afraid of a creepy show on Lifetime, and will one day be the retired old lady annoyed that after decades, it is still unavailable to stream anywhere online.  

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Rachel Petzinger is a writer living in New Jersey. Her web series, Dear Rachel, recently filmed and released an Unsolved Mysteries parody episode.

Home

Photo by the author.

"Are your roommates home tonight?"

It was inorganic phrasing though the intent was clear. I was at an apartment party in Brooklyn, celebrating the end of a friend’s battle with lymphoma. It was a small gathering, but just big enough for there to be a new person for you to meet in each corner of the loft. To this very day, I have no recollection of the name of the sandy blonde haired boy I was speaking to that night. I do recall the feeling of warmth rising from my cheeks to my ears as I blushed with slight, hopefully unrecognizable, embarrassment at his question.

“My roommates? Yeah, they are.” I frowned. My roommates have probably been sleeping since 10pm, I silently added. I then imagined my mother and father innocently in bed, a muted black and white Arabic soap playing on the television, my father’s snore stifling nighttime’s suburban cacophony.

I felt no need to offer the fact that my parents were my roommates. As well as my two older brothers. And my dog. And a cat that would probably be pissed if he knew I referred to him as "mine."

***

It was May 2013 and I was graduating. I had been dreading this moment since September, as it was a year earlier than my original classmates. But that was always part of the plan. NYU was my dream school; its tuition was my father’s nightmare. Subtracting a year from my path to a humanities degree was my aim in order to relieve the financial stress.

Moving home to New Jersey upon graduation was also part of the plan.

That summer, I found myself involved in constant conversation about my unemployment and living situation. I received phone calls on Monday afternoons from friends and family inquiring about my employment status. As if it was normal for a person at work to place a personal call. I am since convinced purgatory is sitting in your childhood bedroom on a Tuesday afternoon eating stale chips and watching Breaking Bad as a post-grad, periodically checking your spam folder to see if maybe you missed a potential employer’s response.

When I finally accepted (read: was offered) a job in the fall, my old worries were replaced by new ones. All of my friends were experiencing the same routine I so badly wished I still had: classes, sorority events, early (and free!) film screenings at the Cantor Film Center, the luxury of peeing in any NYU building they pleased. I was working a 9 to 5 (sometimes 6, 7, 8) job that had me frowning most weekday mornings as I got ready. It wasn’t a job I wanted, but one I felt obligated to accept simply because it was a job and I felt shame for being unemployed for the summer as it was. As much as I dreaded going to work everyday, it became an escape; a way back into the city I loved, a reason to be there, to pretend I was still part of it.

Albeit, work could only keep me for so many hours. I still wasn’t waking up to the sounds of construction that I once detested but began to deeply miss. Waking up in the bedroom I grew up in all my life felt foreign. The Die Hard posters on my wall, the mess of clothing covering any suitable path into and out of my room, the sound of my brother brushing his teeth in the bathroom in the morning – all of these signs of normalcy felt wrong. There was an electrifying quality of New York City life that I craved, but more than that – I felt like moving home meant I was moving backwards.

I resented my living situation and stayed in New York five nights a week. I was at Dollar Beers every Tuesday night (yawning by midnight as my friends were just getting started) and spent many nights on a blown up air mattress in my friend's narrow kitchen (complete with a slanted tile floor) in the West Village. I would say goodnight to my friend, whose hospitality remained persistent and unwavering despite the inconvenient size of her apartment, and attempted to sleep in the dark space, large enough for my twin size air mattress alone. I spent many nights peering through the dark at the shelf of pantry goods in front of me – mostly spices and oatmeal - feeling somber. It never made sense: my nights out were generally great or mediocre, at worst; and yet, I felt sad going to sleep. It wasn’t the discomfort of my back or irrational fear of rats running across my body, as these were things I ignored at least until the sun rose. It was a longing; a deep and equal combination of lacking and wanting.

It’s an ingrained habit that I call my parents everyday. During my nights in New York, I would text my parents when I arrived in the city, when I reached my (initial) destination, and make time to call at a reasonable hour feigning my bedtime. Their voices, whether tired, bored, or blocked out by the welcoming recognition of my dog barking to my voice in the background, would make my heart sink a little. This happened every time I spent the night away from home. I missed my parents. I missed my house. I missed walking in to see my aunts and uncles drinking coffee or scotch (depending on the hour) or my parents watching a movie in the family room. I missed my dog scratching my feet until I removed my socks so he could lick my feet and his desperate pleas for me to never go away ever again.

My house was a home I enjoyed being at. It was filled with love and security and it offered a place for me to hide when stressed or annoyed. My family provided a drama-free, problem-free zone. Walking into my house was equivalent to a sigh of relief.  And after months of making a home on friends’ couches, I began to prefer my own bed.

I think in order to make a home, the people you choose to live with trump the location of choice. This isn’t the same for everyone. Some people prefer living alone, or living in the “perfect” apartment with complete strangers. But for me, walking in to a face I want to see is what makes a home. My last year at NYU was part of the reason leaving New York City was so hard; I came home to a roommate I would gladly pry my eyes open all night just to stay up and talk to and lived down the hall from a best friend who supplied me with ingenious advice and, if not, a sympathetic “Oh, Nat” every time I had a problem. I was waking up to the company of people I couldn’t wait to hang out with, and for that, I was spoiled.

In the past two years, my friends have gone their separate ways, no longer making the hallway of Palladium, an NYU residential hall, the central location of convenience. My cherished roommate, Tamara, moved to San Francisco; my constant source of advice, comfort, and irritation, Josh, began to work inconsistent and long hours as an investment banking analyst; and, I, of course, had moved to New Jersey. Things were changing regardless of our wants. Oddly, I found it relaxing. I never wanted to look back at my past year and find myself in the exact same place.

Moving doesn’t need to be physical. I’ve found that living at home, though juvenile in reputation, has propelled me into adulthood faster than living on my own in New York would. I’m less spontaneous and more if-you-want-me-there-give-me-24-hour-notice. I don’t know if that qualifies as adulthood or the result of me no longer packing my travel toothbrush in my purse, but I would like to believe it’s the former. My friend Sal’s response to drama is, “I make too much money for this shit.” I follow the same concept, just tweaked a little: I have too little time for this shit. Living a dual-residential lifestyle is difficult and exhausting; the only way I can make the most of it is if I spend my time in the company of people who add to my life and make me happy. Living in New York set me on a routine in which I saw the same people every day. Commuting has forced me to carry an agenda around that allows me to write down reminders to grab dinner, drinks, or see a show with all the interesting people in my life that are easy to lose touch with.

And sometimes commuting has forced me into contact with people I have lost touch with, as I take the bus into the city with my former high school peers. Apparently it is more likely for me to run into an old friend on a late NJ Transit train than a bar in New York. Just ask my friend Rono Yick, who found me grumpy and tired on an 11PM train home but still thought it was a good idea to sit next to me. Rono is actually one of the few high school peers I’ve ran into in transit that has offered an optimistic point of view of commuting. Usually, I share sighs and grumbles with people, complaining about delays or the two hours of our day reserved for the road; not Rono. Rono told me, “It’s definitely challenging, and it keeps you away from living a ‘normal’ life with co-workers and friends in the city, but I think living at home is where I need to be. If it gets in the way of work, then I will consider other options.”

That was nice to hear, simple and true. I have friends who live of equal or longer distance to Manhattan from Brooklyn than I do from New Jersey, and while we agree that commuting sucks, it is something we make do for the sake of building a home. I read and write more than ever with my 50-minute bus commute to and from work. I see extended family and friends in the same weekend. No, I can’t be in two places at once, but I do my best to make it work for everyone, most importantly myself. It’s a tiring lifestyle – unique and common in its own respects – but never boring.

---

Natalia Lehaf is a writer and audio/visual artist living in New Jersey. Find more from Natalia on her website.

The Stomach Bump

The author and her grandmother.

You’re not supposed to ask an Alzheimer’s patient, “Who’s this person, what’s his name? Do you remember him?” It insults them, but Nana never had that reaction. She giggled and sometimes remembered I’m Rachel; other times she called me Debbie or Linda. Debbie is my aunt. I have no idea who Linda is. 

My brother Wil and I spent most of our time before kindergarten at our grandparents’ house in Holiday City, a quiet retirement community in Toms River, New Jersey. The houses were all pastel-colored one-storied homes with neatly kept lawns like the neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands. I went on walks with my grandfather and was always annoyed at how he would stop and chat with any neighbor who was sitting on their porch, taking out garbage, getting pulled out on a stretcher. I can’t remember my grandmother ever going outside unless she was with someone. 

I remember her mostly in the kitchen, in a floral apron always equipped with tissues. She kept her silk white hair out of her face with dozens of bobby pins. Her dark skin was wrinkled like paper. Her eyes, though brown, had blue linings on their limbus. Sometimes she played Go Fish with us. When one of my favorite Beanie Babies ripped, she sewed it back together like it was nothing. She taught me how to write a Z in cursive.

When I was 9, after my grandfather died, Nana moved into my father’s house in Allentown, NJ, where Wil and I lived half the time after our parents divorced. We had to share my bedroom while my dad rearranged the house. I remember they argued a lot, but I don’t remember about what. I think most of them were misunderstandings. Her catchphrase for a while was, “May the Lord strike me down!” 

At our dad’s in the summertime, Wil and I spent the days with Nana, since we didn’t go to school in Allentown and didn’t know anyone within more than a block radius. We had a neighbor, Pat, who was super awesome and always bought us toys because she hated her teenage daughter. Plus, she let us swim in her pool when she wasn’t there. (I liked Pat until I was 15, when she got drunk and insisted that she rub sunscreen on my badly sunburnt legs. That freaked me out.) Around noon, Nana would trot next-door and tell us lunch was ready, and we’d beg for five minutes, and she would say we weren’t even supposed to be there anyway. She never understood that Pat allowed us to trespass. 

Nana and I would watch That’s So Raven on her bed. She got a kick out of Raven for some reason. She called her “the girl.” We watched American Idol, too. She spoke so highly of Randy Jackson. She would go, “That one, that feller, he’s reasonable. He’s the nice one.” The Twilight Zone was reserved for New Year’s Eve, when SciFi ran marathons (before they changed their name). I was glued to the TV for the episode “The Eye of the Beholder,” even though Nana called out the twist at the beginning. She chirped up, “Isn’t she actually beautiful and they’re piggies?” I was amazed by how smart she was when I saw the ending.

On her birthday in 2005, I won the lead role of Gertrude McFuzz in our school’s play, Seussical the Musical. (Some people will tell you Gertrude is not the lead, but they are wrong. She is the most important character in the whole story.) Wil and I came home from school and couldn’t find Nana anywhere. She was always in the kitchen making dinner when we came home. Her bedroom door was closed, so I peeked in. I saw her sitting in the dark with the TV on. She wasn’t paying any attention to it. I turned on the light.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

She lifted her head and her eyes slowly lit up, as if it took her a moment to come back from a sad memory. “Oh, hello.” 

“Happy birthday! How old are you?”

“Too old,” she chuckled. Wil made a b-line for her remote control and then her forehead for a kiss. He put sunglasses and a tiara on her and insisted that I take her picture with my nifty new camera phone.

“Hey, Nana, guess what? Rachel is going to play a stupid bird onstage –“ 

“Shut up! I’m telling her. Nana, I’m going to play the lead bird in our school play.” 

She clapped her hands together and exclaimed, “My little actress!”

Over the next few months, she began giving me a lot of her possessions. She had a little knickknack of a Japanese boy, a knickknack of an old man reading a newspaper called Good News. A couple kissing on a bench, a candle with a dog next to a fire hydrant. They all showed up on my dresser one day and I thought maybe it was Wil pulling a prank on me without actually knowing how comedy worked. But when I tried to return them to her, she shook her head. 

“No, no, I want you to have them.”

“Why? Don’t you want them?”

“I want you to have them.” She handed me a book called The Tragedy of X. I had never heard her talk about books or movies or anything that she had read or watched on her own. It prompted me to ask her what her favorite movie actually was. 

She thought a minute. “I can’t remember the name… Judy Garland. She’s a girl. It’s in color. Some of it.” 

“Do you mean The Wizard of Oz?”

“Yeah. That one was good.” 

I pestered her that entire day with questions about her past. It hadn’t occurred to me until then, at 13 years old, that this woman knew everything about me, (even how I liked my peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwiches) yet I barely knew a thing about her outside of being my grandmother. Unlike my parents, or even my grandfather, who always made sure their stories would live on through Wil and me, Nana never spoke anything about life before 1992. All I knew about her childhood was that she was the youngest of five kids and hated her older sister, Jenny, who one time (allegedly) held her head under a faucet. That was all I knew of her life before my birth. I tried to get more out of her:

“Was the Great Depression tough?”

“Huh? Yeah. I played baseball.”

“Did you like Elvis?”

“Don’t stand so close to the stove.”

“I’m not.”

“You’ll catch on fire.”

“I’m nowhere near the stove! Can you still speak Italian? What does fongool mean?” I asked, knowing full well what it meant.

“It means put plates on the table.”

On March 8th, 2006, she woke up and complained that her stomach hurt, but we were running late for school and I told her to feel better. My father called later to tell Wil and I that she went to the hospital for an ulcer. 

My play was later that week. “Will she still be able to see me be Gertrude?”

“I don’t know, Rachel.”

She didn’t get better later that week, that month, or that year. She was in the hospital for the whole summer and then was put into a nursing home. Every time we visited, Nana became less and less of the woman I had known for fourteen years. We used to sit in the cafeteria because the rooms could get stuffy and, depending on who Nana’s roommate was at the time, smelled like either urine or too much perfume. Whenever I would say that I felt bad with her stuck there, my dad would say in the kindest way possible that it’s her own fault for not taking care of herself. I thought she took care of herself okay. She liked Oreos and Entenmann’s pound cake, but I never saw her eat in excess. In fact, even when she was in the hospital and couldn’t be fed without help, she still offered everyone her food. When she couldn’t speak, she would pick up a soggy piece of bread and hold it in front of me in case I wanted it. 

I fed her in the nursing home because she was too weak to feed herself. My dad and my brother used to roughhouse with each other in their seats, which made me angry because it seemed disrespectful. But at some point I no longer minded it. Maybe this is what we would be doing if we were at home. Maybe this makes it feel more like old times. My dad wasn’t as close to Nana as he was his father, but I know in his own way, he cared about her. For a while, every visit her wheelchair would be so dusty you could write the Bible in it. Each visit he would speak to management and say something needed to be done, and nothing ever was, until finally Wil and I heard him through the walls ripping the manager a new one in his office. Her wheelchair was spotless after that. 

There were these two sisters in their 60s who were always there visiting their 100-year-old mother. Every single time we visited, no matter what day of the week or what time of day, they’d be there. They were the only people Nana would talk to. It was a relief that she had a place to sit and she wasn’t alone. They told me I was a good granddaughter, feeding my grandmother like that. But one day, the three of them weren’t there and we never saw them again. 

“So, Nana, who’s this?” my dad would ask, pointing to Wil. Unlike me, who, with the exception of puberty, has generally looked the same throughout life, my brother has never looked like the same person for more than 6 months.

“Hummm… Bill,” she guessed.

“Your son? That’s me,” he teased.

She smiled, thinking she was correcting him. “My man, Bill.” 

The three of us shared a laugh and she joined in. Even if she didn’t get it, it was just nice to see her laughing instead of crying that she wanted to go home. I think our biggest laugh together was one time I asked her if she had a bellybutton. I never knew the whole story, but apparently after she gave birth to my aunt, her bellybutton had to be removed, or something. I’m not positive if that’s even true or if she was, as she would say, “pulling my leg.” Either way, I asked her if she had one, and she goes, “I don’t know, let me check,” and lifted her shirt all the way up, exposing her breasts to us. We all lost it, and that time I think she knew what we were laughing about. The first boobs Wil saw were his grandmother’s.

That’s how visits typically went until I was 18 and heading off to NYU. Though she couldn’t hold a conversation before, she soon couldn’t even answer basic yes-or-no questions. I visited her the day before I moved to New York and found her wheeling aimlessly around the hallways. She didn’t understand that when I tried to take her into the cafeteria, we were visiting her. She didn’t know who any of us were.

During spring break of 2011, when the rest of the world was busy torturing Rebecca Black, Nana had to go into the hospital again. I didn’t pay much attention to how serious my dad was making this time sound, since he’s the kind of guy who every time someone has a cold, he’s preparing their eulogy. But it soon became clear that for once my dad’s exaggerations were realistic. We all knew what was around the corner. 

On March 19th, 2011, my mother took Wil and I to see Nana. We found our father beside her. She was hardly recognizable. The nurses wrapped gloves around her hands to keep her from pulling tubes, but when they were off, you could see her long, yellow nails. Her hair that she had once meticulously kept in bobby pins was greasy and strewn about, and her fragile body was mangled and twisted in sheets and tubes. On her stomach was a giant unshapely bump that stuck out about 10 inches. I just assumed it was more tubes and ignored it.

“You guys know what that is?” my dad asked. 

Wil shook his head, and I answered confidently, “Yeah, just her tubes.”

My dad responded, “Her stomach. That’s her food. But she has no more muscle, so it all just sits there.” 

“Okay, stop talking.”

“You remember Alien–”

“SHUT UP!” I screamed. 

If my dad’s girlfriend hadn’t been in the bathroom, she would’ve yelled at me to respect my father, and how I’m ungrateful. But thankfully she wasn’t, it was only my parents, Wil, and what was left of Nana. I looked in her eyes, and she returned back a conscious gaze that I hadn’t seen in years. She cupped her hand under my chin and announced loudly and proudly, “I love you.” 

The next day she was asleep for the entire visit. My dad and Wil went to the cafeteria to eat, but I wasn’t hungry, so I stayed in the room alone with her. 

I took off her glove and held her hand. It was cold. For a long time, I sat in silence wondering how long it had been that they were downstairs eating. I wondered about how maybe Nana had already seen that episode of The Twilight Zone and she wasn’t really a genius after all. I thought about how I would never have one of her world famous peanut-butter-and-jellies again, even though it had already been years since she made one. I guessed it was already too late to ask the truth about her bellybutton. 

I gently squeezed her hand. “Hey, you know what, Nana? When I was in 8th grade, you missed the performance of the century. I was Gertrude in Seussical. I can sing you a song if you’d like.” 

I fixed up her blankets and sang quietly, since this was a private show: “There once was a girl-bird, named Gertrude McFuzz…” 

I had to catch a train back to New York, since spring break was over. I took one last look at the woman who taught me how to write a Z in cursive and left. I never saw her again.

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Rachel Petzinger is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her webseries, Dear Rachel, just debuted its second season.

Warped Tour Taught Me How to Love

Older Brothers, Pop Punk, and the Flaccid Inevitability of Cool

The author and his older brother at Warped Tour.

“What the word ‘over’ really means is that your expectations of a place, your fantasies of who you might become there, have been confounded by the persistence of you.”

— Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Oh, the archetypal older brother... 

That mansion on the hill of masculinity, that gatekeeper of "cool," the champion and the fuck-up. Older brothers are responsible for a whole litany of the word's passions and sensibilities. Accordingly so, I would not be here today if it weren't for my older brother Alex. Four years my senior, Alex provided a clear picture of success in my preteen mind as he spent his high school years establishing a unique teenage identity for himself, a life that I spent a great amount of time daydreaming about as I pictured myself in his shoes in my own upcoming teen years. All the while I was blissfully unaware of the fact that the whole thing–the scene, sensibilities, and identity for which Alex found himself–would quickly be rendered extinct by the swift tide of popular culture and the frivolous nature of "cool." 

You'd be hard pressed to call Alex a nerd. He rode mountain bikes, looked people right in the eye, and his existence had a funny way of inciting freshman girls to write paint pen love notes all over his Nissan Pathfinder. He had friends, lots of them, and some of them even had vaginas. He was voted "Most Attractive" in his senior yearbook; the result of a vigorous campaign by his mischievous friends, but an undeniable testament to his overall popularity regardless. Despite all this, somehow, someway, the climate and sensibilities that defined youth culture in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina from 2003 to 2007 allowed a popular teenager like Alex to spend his weekends moshing at NC Hardcore shows, driving cross state with attractive girls to see bands like Jack's Mannequin, and skanking across dance floors at amateur Ska shows. In a feat made possible by an early preoccupation with Minor Threat, inherent pressure surrounding his status as the first kid out of the gate in our family, and a lingering private school imposed skittishness regarding illicit substances, Alex did it all sober as a whistle.

Alex's friends had an aforementioned Nth wave Ska band called the BFGs. After their occasional shows, Alex and his friends would drive across town to Cookout (North Carolina treasure, Fast Food Mecca, Drive Thru Only) and at least once, he brought me along. I remember sitting in the back seat, sweaty from the physical toll Ska demanded that night, watching him and his friends intently as I dreamed about my turn at the car, the cool friends, the cute girls, and the basement shows. Just then, two of Alex's friends pulled up next to us in their car, triumphantly blasting Brand New's "Seventy Times 7"–quite possibly the best Emo diss song ever–as they passionately shouted lines from the song at Alex, who returned the favor. The same kids had a garage band of their own and they tried out for their high school talent show with a cover of "Seventy Times 7" but were disqualified for that pesky line where Brand New's JesseLacey implores former bandmate/Taking Back Sunday's Syd Barrett, John Nolan, to "have another drink and drive yourself home," and to "think of me when you forget your seatbelt and again when your head goes through the windshield." Brand New was cool. Alex was cool. They were all so fucking cool.

I was thirteen. 

Alex showed me who I could be and the Warped Tour showed me who I was. Determined to define myself through the pages of Alternative Press magazine, I spent hours combing forums for New Found Glory b-sides, bee-lining through Borders and Best Buy in search of the CD racks, and sitting alone in my bedroom writing sappy emails of adoration to the members of Yellowcard. All the while, each and every year from age 11 on, I attended the now infamously shitty Vans Warped Tour. Somehow, I had managed to establish my identity through a world that was neither cool nor smart, and I couldn't have cared less. I placed my coveted Fall Out Boy hoodies and macabre Senses Fail t-shirts front row center in each and every single yearbook photo without question. I had somehow found confidence in the individualism afforded to me by one of the biggest rip-off scenes in the history of guitars. The Warped world gave me a confidence that manifested itself in the form of the Taking Back Sunday t-shirts (plural) I wore to school damn near every day and that time I gave the Queen Bee of my 8th grade class Panic! At the Disco's A Fever You Can't Sweat Out for her birthday. Hell, I even dabbled in a Hot Topic studded belt from time to time. Fuck 'em. 

When considering the years of my life as a nerd, the years wherein Warped Tour was king, I am disturbed by the warmth of my nostalgia. Despite the fact that my life between the age of eleven and fifteen involved the most self-loathing and alienation I have experienced in my entire life, I have no doubt those years were the purest time of my life as a music fan. Physical media was dying and I was coming alive. Still, the wheel of popular culture moved on and it wasn't soon before I started hanging out with kids who listened to Arcade Fire, unbeknownst to the fact that I was about to truly understand the consequences of cool.

I didn't care much for 2007. The year marked the moment where American Pop Culture in the 2000s finally got the hangover it deserved, facing the repercussions of a half decade spent upholding a pop landscape wherein bands like Fall Out Boy, Green Day, and even Bowling For Soup stood and sold alongside artists like Kelly Clarkson and Justin Timberlake. Sure, The Offspring and Green Day cashed their fair share of checks in the nineties, but we're talking about a time where My Chemical Romance's "Helena" played in dentists' offices for pete's sake. Songs about driving fast in the summer and crying on bloody sleeves got very, very popular which of course lead to them being very, very hated, especially by the nerds of the Indie Rock world. As I was wearing checkered Vans slip-ons to school dances and fighting the good fight without shame, the musicians in my favorite Warped bands–many of whom started out as teenagers themselves–were nervously changing their sound, style, and haircuts in a desperate attempt to combat the critical cries of sad nerdy music critics. Despite all the exasperated tears and emotional anthems the scene churned out over the years, every artist seemed dead set on finally becoming "serious." New Found Glory replaced screeching synths and snotty kiss-off anthems with Benmont Tench assisted lounge piano ditties. Brand New, a band once capable of producing a line like "drop me like a brick off a rooftop of your high school," left the overpasses, mix tapes, and magazines of Long Island in favor of making The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, a record as bloated and disingenuous as its title. The scene upon which I formulated my entire identity had become such an embarrassment that its own leaders rejected it publicly in the form of the "serious" follow up record, a feat only ever really pulled off with integrity by Blink-182. 

For a year or two I eschewed new albums entirely, floating in a purgatory of endless listens of Catch-22's Keasbey Nights. At fifteen, I felt like I had voluntarily tied myself to the mast of a sinking ship, blind with loyalty and devotion, only to witness the captain abandon his helm entirely in order to spend his time churning out half-assed murky instrumental explorations of white dude existentialism. As I stared into the incoming abyss, I wondered how cold the water would be, realizing my fate was plainly due to my steadfast allegiance to the ship, the scene, the whole thing that almost every single person in my life found childish and irksome. Icy water lapped my face as the tidal wave of high school social life rose in front of me yet still, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what people saw in those bearded mopes in Fleet Foxes.

There's another kind of older brother. The kind who read James Joyce recreationally, identifies "cool" as a product of inaction rather than action, and considers the preservation of good taste within the family to be an imperative, damn near an heirloom of self-respect that was worth fighting for. That was Graeme for ya. Three years older than his brother (and my best friend) Harrison, Graeme made it through Dylan's discography before leaving for college and his teenage angst was soundtracked by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. One time I was sleeping over at their house and he woke me up in the middle of the night to hand me a Dave Eggers piece about The Flaming Lips and the concept of "selling out," inexplicably printed out and delivered to me for reasons that were and are beyond my comprehension. Years later in my twenties, I asked Graeme about the incident and he couldn't recall it ever happening. He never seemed to care much for me and in those years I never knew what to make of him. But to Harrison–my best friend and his baby brother–he was fucking cool. 

No one wants to hear what the guy in the Motion City Soundtrack shirt has to say about Sufjan Stevens. For me, this lesson became strikingly clear upon entrance to high school as I surrounded myself with timid proto-Hipsters like Harrison and confidently asserted things like "Arcade Fire sounds like U2 recorded through a bathroom wall and I really fucking hate U2." I would say that I spent that year fighting with Harrison about records like Funeral, Come On Feel the Illinoise, For Emma Forever Ago, and Ragged Wood, but typically arguments need more than one participant. He valued my opinion of his music just as much as he valued my music, meaning not at all, which wouldn't have been an issue had I not valued his opinion on absolutely everything more than anyone else's in the world. For months, I stood fast behind the "Arcade Fire is bathroom wall music" position, a sensibility linked to both my fondness for the lyrical specificity of pop-punk and aversion to the mounds of reverb that laced Indie Rock at that (and most) times. Perhaps I was fumbling with the wiring Alex installed within me years before, trying to hear past the unfortunate echoes of what was formally cool. 

Then one night it snowed in our sleepy Southern town and I trudged through the moonlit roads to the tune of Arcade Fire's "Tunnels." It was beautiful and I felt like an asshole. Yeah, it was bathroom music but that wasn't going to keep me from sitting on the pot a little longer. I considered forgetting all about my attraction to "Tunnels," bunny hopping over the rabbit hole, renewing my Alternative Press subscription for life, and getting a nautical star tattoo the moment I turned 18. You see I was scared to admit I was wrong, scared to give up power to Harrison's taste, and scared to abandon the musical world that made me who I was.

But I didn't forget about it. I returned again and again and soon devouring the whole record. This snowy moment and the weeks that followed marked my first formal introduction to indie rock, a world immediately defined by controlling feelings of perceived ignorance and the corresponding guilt and shame they create. I wore Funeral down and quickly began gathering some opinions on other hip records at the time: Bon Iver (sleepy but not boring) and Sufjan Stevens (wordy, weepy, reminded me of Forgive Durden's Wonderland). Proud of the hard listening I had put in, I went to Harrison and began our first of many shop talks. Like a dentist trying to talk shop with a doctor at a dinner party, I engaged Harrison sloppily. He humored me, opting to reply not with antagonism but with watered down discourse. I felt like an idiot but it felt good to fit in again. That night, we drove with our friends around town, down the same streets Alex did to "Seventy Times 7," except now "Rebellion (Lies)" played and I sang along in the backseat. 

Surprisingly, Hipsterdom at seventeen actually offered me the same freedoms and independence I had witnessed in a teenage Alex. Harrison's voracious taste and commandeering influence turned his trash-laden BMW into a classroom, offering lessons on '60s Soul, Bowie, Animal Collective, "96 Tears," LCD Soundsystem, Clipse, Deerhunter, My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, and the untouchable Pet Sounds. We spent countless hours driving cross state to see bands at Carrboro's Cats Cradle and Asheville's The Orange Peel. Years after the BFGs were defunct, my own high school friends started a garage band called Graham & The Crackers and managed to book some local shows, covering songs we loved like Twin Shadow's "Forget," and Phoenix's "1901," and drawing a significantly less raucous crowd in the same venues my brother skanked about in. 

Although Harrison's taste was my north star of sorts, I did manage to find some of my own musical loves during those years. Drawing upon my Warped predisposition for the loud and the snotty, I poured over records like Jay Reatard's Blood Visions, unlocked mixtape rap with Lil Wayne's Da Drought 3, and came full circle with my pop-punk past via Wavves' King of The Beach. I grew to approach my scene kid shame by out right pretending the Warped Tour never happened. I bought Vampire Weekend t-shirts and frequented Good Will, leaving the merch table purchased punk shirts that comprised the entirety of my wardrobe for years untouched on my shelves. After four years and a couple tense moments–most notably a drunken spat over who "discovered" Illmatic first–me and Harrison's strict power dynamic, that master/pupil relationship, faded. I might not know more than him but I knew what was cool, cool enough for the two of us. 

As far as I was concerned, Graeme and his subsequent influence on Harrison were a far cry from Alex's brotherly influence on myself. Maybe it was Alex's fault for the identity issues I suffered at the hand of cool growing up. Graeme was preternaturally opposed to the kind of loud, sleezy, whiny, youthful amateur hour culture upon which Alex built his entire independence. He taught Harrison to be a discerning listener, to begin a life-long dig in search of hidden classics within the annals of popular music, and to value taste above all. This gentle brotherly air of musical supremacy may have saved Harrison from the four MxPx albums I bought in the 2000s. It certainly kept him from the Hawthorne Heights show I went to in lieu of a school dance when I was thirteen. However, if given a chance to go back and do it again, I wouldn't change a goddamn thing. 

Alex introduced me to the singular pleasure of belonging–sweat drenched and hoarse–amongst a community of individuals bound by nothing more than unquestionable love of somebody else's noise. Harrison introduced me to the treacherous reality of belonging that lies in the the inevitable exclusionary element that occurs when those on the inside confront those looking in. Years later, the whole thing looks silly. Pitchfork is writing articles about the absolute uncoolness of Sufjan Stevens. The biggest DJ in the world in the world is the kid from From First to Last. Tide comes in, tide comes out, and this lesson in cool made me realize that as long as it feels good, it is good. This ethos was delivered through mosh pits and side-swiped bangs and directly led to my love of both pop and dance music. Never again will I whole-heartedly define myself through the taste and sensibilities of another, not a big brother, a best friend, or a band, for that feeling of belonging that leads one to a scene or identity can be beautiful and all encompassing but it is always inevitably fragile. What Alex could have never taught me was the treacherous part of belonging that lies in the inevitable exclusion of those who don't belong. I had to come upon this realization myself through harsh experience from the inside and outside of a scene, an experience specific to my passage through the Warped world that would have been completely absent had I been cool since day one, reared on Brian Eno straight out of the womb. All the studded belts, Hot Topic trips, Senses Fail t-shirts, and Warped Tour dates meant something. As important as punk was for the creation of my personal identity, this failure of cool was even more integral. The wheel of pop culture moves on and the coolest thing I can do is take it all in.

---

Nick Boyd is the New York Editor of Shuf Sounds and the founder of Sorry Records. You can find him on Twitter.

Poke

Taylor died. I don't know how, or when, exactly. But he is, in fact, dead, and never coming back. I know this because I saw it on Facebook. 

We called him "Black Taylor." It was the kind of joke that faux-liberal white teenagers raised in rural Vermont would find funny. Black Taylor wasn't black, but he wore a lot of white t-shirts and loose jeans and loved rap music. He was an amateur rapper himself. 

He became fast friends with one of the RAs, which is what the Governor’s Institute of Vermont called their camp counselors. I don’t remember the RA’s name, but he also loved rap music. One day the RAs were allowed to teach their own class, and this guy taught a class on the history of hip-hop. He was also a semi-pro birdwatcher.

It was 2007. Facebook wasn’t really a thing. I only got one because my friend Bailey had one, but all of my friends were still on MySpace. The people I met at the Governor’s Institute were a little older than me - thinking about college, about SAT scores, about sex. I thought about those things, too. The difference was that those things were actually happening to these people. 

They all used Facebook. When they weren’t off in the woods making out, they would spend their free time huddled around the few internet-connected computers in the student center. They wanted to know what their friends at home were doing. They felt removed. I felt removed, too, but from the people in front of me, as I stood on the edge of groups and watched them talk and laugh like they had been friends for years when in fact they’d only met days ago. I laughed when they laughed, pretending to feel included.

There was a White Taylor. White Taylor was white, blonde, very skinny with bulging eyes. The popular joke was that he was a crack addict. White Taylor wasn’t White Taylor just because we needed some to complete the nickname yin-yang. White Taylor came from a rich family. White Taylor was going to Bates. White Taylor wore polos.

This was the Governor’s Institute of Vermont on Current Issues and Youth Activism, where we knew enough about racial inequality to make the joke, but never had to confront the realities of it outside of our bubble of white privilege. We were literally up on a hill, at the School of International Training, looking over Brattleboro, Vermont, the city that proclaimed that it would arrest George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes if they ever stepped foot in city limits. We were morally and intellectually superior. It was implied and we believed it.

I walked in on Black Taylor taking a shit. The dorms we were staying in had communal bathrooms. I pressed open the door to a stall and there he was: backwards baseball cap on his head, loose jeans bundled at his ankles, and his eyes staring at me from his throne up on the hill.

I apologized and backed away into my own stall, right next to his. He laughed. We made awkward small talk. I was done before him, washed my hands, and left. It was the only private interaction we had together, the only time he had really acknowledged my existence in any significant way. 

And then Taylor died.

Not right away, but eventually, the same way all of us will. I found this out a few years later, on Facebook, when one of our mutual friends from the Governor’s Institute left a message on his wall. Miss you. Can’t believe you’re gone. Taken before your time. His wall was full of messages like these; some just short sentences and others long essays on their friendship. All addressed to someone who would never read them.

And now they're gone. His Facebook was deleted at some point by a friend or family member. 

At the end of the Governor's Institute, there was a bonfire. A girl with a guitar sang Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)." Someone played along on a fiddle. It was a tired song then, but the circle of teenagers around the fire, me included, sang under their breaths. It was an amazing experience, we told each other. We would never forget it. We'd stay in touch. Facebook me!

I only found a few pictures from that camp on Facebook. One had Black Taylor standing right in the middle of a big group, me included. He was standing with his chin in his hands, looking up towards the sun.

He used to be tagged in the picture, but he's not anymore.

---

Adam Cecil is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is the managing editor of this zine. You can find more work at his website.

Sundays Since I Have Graduated:

Wake up early to beat the bathroom rush at the hostel¹ I’m living in and spend fifteen minutes waking up by scrolling on my phone.

Go back to sleep.

Wake up and go to the bathroom. Wait ten minutes to go in.

Decide I should do laundry, watch a classic film for research, and write ten pages of a screenplay and then a blog post.

Watch the classic film while eating breakfast.

Wait until I’ve watched half of the film until I actually pack the laundry bag.

Watch the second half before I walk to the laundromat.

Forget to bring the gallon of Tide detergent and waste some precious laundry-tokenquarters on detergent at the laundromat because I’m tired (I’ve done so much work already).

Read something beautiful in a novel while swatting a fly from my head — think I’ll finish 50 pages before I get home.

The fly doesn’t leave me alone — maybe I’ll get to 30.

The fly is gone until I realize it’s in my hair.

Laundry is done — ten pages have been read.

After I shove my laundry in my hostel locker, plan to write a blog post.

Remember I haven’t seen the rest of the last season of The Legend of Korra.

Remember I’m hungry.

Watch Korra while I eat.

Prepare to write the blog post, but realize I only have five hours until I go to sleep early for my internship² the next morning.

Remember the internship doesn’t pay.

Question why I’m spending my parents’ money in a new city without a job.

Check my spam folder to see if a prospective employer’s response got lost.

Check job listings for anything that’s suitable.

Remember everything available would be a hassle to reach by public transport.

Consider getting a car.

Remember climate change.

Ask Google how expensive Teslas are.

Ask Google how expensive bikes are.

Remember the car crash³ I was in last time I was in LA.

Ask Google if I should leave LA.

Ask Google if my favorite filmmakers moved to LA.

Remember I have to write a blog post.

Consider the opinions I have to express about climate change, the economy, the military-industrial complex, institutional racism, women’s rights.

Feel like I would rather talk about my favorite books and/or movies.

Wonder if this is a generational problem or if I’m just selfish.

Get a phone call from a friend and talk to them for an hour.

Make beans and rice.

Watch another classic film while I eat.

Fall in love with the idea of making movies.

Ask Google how the filmmaker of the movie got started.

Write furiously on a script. Convince myself it’s perfect for about a minute before I self-doubt myself.

Rewrite furiously.

Hate the rewrite. Hate the script.

Remember that Orson Welles was also horrible when he started making movies.

Reread for things to change — can’t find anything bad but unsure if anything’s good.

Decide I’m going to go to sleep.

Pack up everything in my hostel locker.

Lay on my twin size top bunk bed.

Ask Google if I can make movies outside of LA.

Watch the news cover the developing story about the US’s military intervention in the Middle East.

Recall that I haven’t talked to a person in real life all day, despite being in a hostel house of fifteen.

Remember that there are bigger problems than me.

Remember to write about them.

Wonder whether I should write about them on the blog or in a script.

Wonder if I am getting read.

Realize that I’m qualifying my writing about real problems like climate change, the economy, the military-industrial complex, institutional racism, women’s rights by whether anyone will read it.

Realize that I’m selfish.

Think that things would be better if I had a job.

Recognize I need a structural change in my life.

Wonder what that change is.

The room is so hot that I have to strip to my boxers.

Think the change is to move out of the hostel.

Remember that would cost more money than I’m spending.

Think all that matters is my craft. Life will be simple that way.

Remember devoting time to helping others is just as important.

And spending time with your friends.

Take solace in the fact that life is too difficult to find the answers for in your twenties.

Fall asleep.

1. I stayed at one of the homes of the Loriff Management developments in LA. If you want to know what $575 a month in rent looks like in West Hollywood, it’ll most likely involve 12-15 people sharing one bathroom. ↩

2. Tesla, the sustainable car for a non-fossil fuel dependent future. Available for anyone with $101, 500 in their pocket. ↩

3. While my friends were driving me around in Orange County, they played Death Grips. Nothing really sets the stage for your car being slammed onto the curb by a speeding car behind you like the first minute of Inanimate Sensation. ↩

---

Saleem Gondal is a writer based in New York. You can find more of his at work on his blog, themellowdramatist.

Taco and the Tramp

About a year ago, a friend and I were drunk-eating tacos at 2 a.m. when a guy approached us. He teased us that we were eating our tacos Lady and the Tramp style, and as we continued talking, he and I started discussing Catholic versus Jewish guilt. He asked for my number, and I gave it to him, not expecting to ever hear back, and pretty much forgot about the whole thing.

Several days ago, however, I got a text from an unknown number saying that I was saved in his phone as “Kathryn Guilt Catholic Taco Tramp.” I reminded him of how we’d met, and when he asked me out, I said yes, without knowing his name or what he looked like.

---

Taco Boy and I were planning to meet at an oyster and liquor bar, but he texted me a few minutes before our meeting time to ask if I wanted to first stop off at his apartment because the weather was “super gross!” His apartment was on the way to the bar, so I agreed to visit, and then proceeded to freak myself out about the possibility that I was going to be abducted or killed in some Law and Order style incident. Instead of telling him that I’d rather meet him in a public place, I just texted a friend his address, and kept my mace in my pocket. (Luckily, he spent so much time checking his phone that even if I had truly been in danger, I could have easily escaped during one of his frequent phone breaks.)

If you’re curious, Taco Boy has a real job but is working on a startup. When I asked what the startup was, he said “productivity.” That’s it. “Productivity.” More questions about it revealed no new information, and while his stated ultimate goal is for the startup to be about productivity, he sort of admitted that he doesn’t know what that’s going to entail exactly. I got the distinct sense that he would not appreciate a joke about how he might need his own startup to actually create a startup.

He then invited me to a seminar that a friend was leading. I soon realized that I’d been invited over in a bait-and-switch style operation, and now I doubt that the plan was ever to go to the oyster and liquor bar.

He told me that his motivational-speaker friend was going to be leading a talk on “personal development.” When I asked him how his friend became a motivational speaker, Taco Boy said that he “didn’t have anything else going on,” as if his friend simply fell into it. The irony of having nothing better to do and deciding to become a motivational speaker was not lost on me, but apparently was on my date: when I commented on the contradiction, he gave me a blank look.

Taco (as we are now on first name basis) then clarified that his friend spoke about not only personal development, but also spent a few minutes at the end of each seminar on how to pick up women. As the conversation progressed, however, Taco revealed that the talk was mostly on how to pick up women, but I was assured that if I wanted to go, there would be other women in attendance who were “just really into personal development,” and am I into self-help stuff at all? (No.) Either way, there would be a ten-minute discussion on the subject. “Some guys,” my date promised, “aren’t into the pick up artist stuff at all and show up in suits with notebooks just to learn the self-help part of it.”
Taco warned me that the talk may seem slightly misogynistic and sexist, but in his experience, his friends that have dabbled in the pick up artist community follow the same three stages:

1. Nerdy, uncool, uncomfortable around women;
2. Really absorbed in pick up culture, become “super gross” and misogynistic, very unpleasant to be around; and finally,
3. Through their sexism, they transform into suave, “super cool” gentlemen who don’t even need the tricks they learned as a pick up artist, “so I’m just like, ‘Okay so you had to be super gross and now you’re like on the other side of it and just cool,’ you know?”

---

About two years ago, I wrote a paper on the subject of how men speak to other men while in the presence of women – how does men’s behavior change when women are around? In doing research for the paper, I stumbled on the pick up artist community, and got completely sucked into it. It’s fascinating to me – especially since the culture feeds off of a very open contempt for women while simultaneously exposing a very naked need for women’s approval and sexual adulation. These men clearly dislike women who sleep around, but the community’s main goal seems to be to sleep with as many women as possible.

To this day, I still regularly read articles on pick up artist sites – of which there are many. My personal favorite is ReturnOfKings.com, which recently published an article called “35 Signs The Girl You’re Dating Is A Whore.” I thought the article would tell men how to find out if their girlfriends are or were promiscuous, but I realized that it’s about how to tell if your girlfriend literally makes her living as a prostitute. I highly recommend the read, if you’re ever unsure about your significant other’s chosen profession.

So when Taco was warning me about how misogynistic I might find his friend’s talk, I was delighted, and reassured him that I wouldn’t be offended. And so, off we went to the Hotel Pennsylvania’s Gold Ballroom.

---

Taco wanted to find an UberX to take us to the hotel, but didn’t want to pay full price, and then there was a surge overcharge, and then he tried to find a promo code online but couldn’t find anything, so we settled on a taxi. Traffic was horrific, so in our three block, $9 cab ride, we had a lot of time to talk.

For inquiring minds, Taco was wearing $500 jeans from “straight off the runway,” whatever that may mean. His real passion is for shoes, including their smell – “of the new ones, I mean.” He has a friend whose girlfriend is six feet tall and “literally a model,” and just last weekend she was grinding with DJ Tiesto! I don’t know who that is, but his tone told me I should be very impressed.

He has another friend who lives by his favorite vegan juice bar, whose girlfriend is Karlie Kloss. Fun fact: Karlie’s face is the front page of Taco’s startup’s website. No word on what Karlie’s boyfriend thinks of that, unfortunately. Taco Boy gave me a look after telling me all this, “You know who that is, right?” Yes – but only because I heard that she’s shacked up with Taylor Swift. No word on what the boyfriend thinks of that, either.

Wanna know another thing Taco Boy hates? Models in his favorite coffee place, especially during Fashion Week. It’s not their fault, you know, but they crowd up the place and he’s just trying to get some work done. Just the other day, he told some girl off about that, but she totally knew he was joking.

By the way, isn’t it the worst when really hot girls are “super bitchy” because they’re so pretty that men never say no to them? A lot of his female friends are like that – “super hot” – and again, it’s not their fault per se, but men shouldn’t give in to them. (Noted.)

We discussed all this in the taxi to the hotel, with frequent, loud interjections from him about how the taxi driver was cheating us. Eventually my date insisted that we exit the taxi and take an Uber after all. But he really wanted a promo code, and still couldn’t find one, so we settled on the subway instead.

Upon finally arriving, we didn’t enter the hotel through its front entrance, but rather through the hotel’s steakhouse, on a winding path that lead us through the dining area and kitchen to ultimately reach a dingy back hallway with an elevator to the ballroom. The reception hall before the ballroom was empty except for some plastic tables, a few folding chairs, a water cooler, and at least a dozen discarded plastic cups scattered on the ground. I started worrying again that I was going to become fodder for a future Law and Order episode. We quietly snuck into the ballroom, Taco greeted his friend at the door, I was instructed to surrender my phone, and we took seats in the back. The seminar had started at 5 p.m., and we arrived just after 8 p.m.

There were approximately one hundred men listening, rapt, to the speaker – who as it turns out, was not Taco’s friend after all, as his friend was only the speaker’s assistant. The speaker was named Todd – I didn’t have confirmation at the time, but could tell that he was one of those guys that spells it with two Ds. I did a little research later and confirmed that I was right.

Is it just me, or is there a certain type of person who calls himself Todd?¹

What I first noticed about the audience was that there were a lot of backwards baseball caps, paired with a lot of Ed Hardy-style shirts. I was the only woman in attendance, despite my date’s fervent promises to the contrary. There were some men taking notes intently, and as I looked around the room further, I saw that some of the men there were my age or younger.

Let me get this out of the way: Todd is not an attractive man. He looks sleazy, with dark, shiny hair slicked back with so much gel that I could see it from the back row. He was wearing two dark v-neck shirts, both unbuttoned to his collarbone, in a style that you can tell he thinks is Johnny-Depp-hip. He’s maybe in his early to mid-thirties. The men in the room had paid $300 to hear him speak for the two-day workshop, a “LIVE event” experience for which Todd claims you’d otherwise “easily spend $10,000 or more. Period,” per his website.²

When we arrived, Todd was showing a clip of him approaching a woman in Washington Square Park. She’s sitting on a bench, headphones in, and he approaches her while his friend hovers nearby, awkwardly and surreptitiously filming the interaction. Todd first showed the pick-up in its entirety, and then he started it over again to break down each step of the conversation with his commentary. He started with an “opener” about how the woman was sitting, and she challenged him in response with a “shit-test” by objecting that she was only listening to music. (A shit-test is a “combative response” to whatever the pick up artist has just said.) Eventually, after several more shit-tests, the woman agreed to go get yogurt with him. There’s more hidden camera footage of Todd and his lady walking to a 16 Handles, more footage of them sitting outside eating, and even more footage of Todd walking the woman back to her apartment – which is turns out, is the NYU freshmen dorm Hayden Hall, where I used to live. The cameraman is left outside, but Todd alleges that he was able to sneak into the dorm without being signed in as a guest, went up to the girl’s room, and then hung out with her and her roommate for awhile. I want to add that Todd met her while the sun was still out, and then walks her back to her dorm well after sunset – the cameraman must have been following them for hours.

Todd warned the audience that they should watch out for the “super tight” security in NYU dorms, and do their best to sneak past the guards in the lobby as often as possible. Although some audience members did seem to be college-aged, most were in their late twenties or early thirties, or older, yet none balked at the idea of hanging out with an eighteen-year-old college freshman in her dorm room.

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Todd really emphasized “sneaking one past the goalie,” which is just as nauseating as you’d expect. Todd’s prime example of this technique was telling a girl that he’d like to have “unprotected sex in a disrespectful manner with her in a public place.” Basically, there’s just so much wrong with that statement that she simply can’t disagree with it all! Says Todd, “If she says, ‘Unprotected sex? No, you should always use a condom!’ then she’s not disagreeing with the sex! If she says, ‘Disrespectful? That’s so rude!’ Well, she’s not disagreeing with having sex with me!” I’m not sure how this plays out in real life, but apparently it’s extraordinarily effective; once you’ve pointed out to the girl that she hasn’t objected to having sex with you, I guess she’s duty-bound to fuck you. (?) If you’re really just looking to have women sleep with you because they feel conned into it, this technique might be what you’re looking for.

Another tip: get the woman emotionally invested in you. The 18 year old in Washington Square Park was emotionally invested in him as soon as she called him a “cocky liar.” She’s begun “qualifying” him, which demonstrates his “value.” It’s just a slam-dunk from there!

A third tip, courtesy of Todd: when you’re shaking a woman’s hand, don’t shake it as you would a man’s, as that’s too business-like for ladies. Instead, rotate the palm of your hand up when shaking her hand, which seems more “personal.” You’ll want to be gently cradling her hand in the palm of yours. This wasn’t a recommendation of Todd’s, but I imagine that if you do it quickly enough, you can probably break her wrist in the process. Then you’ll be able to accompany her to the E.R., which I expect would probably lead to a ton of that super valuable emotional investment you’re going for.

After analyzing three “pulls,” including one in which the woman tells Todd several times that she has a boyfriend but gives him her number regardless³, it’s time for role-playing. The first exercise is “Yes, and” statements; when a woman shit-tests you, you should affirm what she’s said, and add something else to it. By saying yes, teaches Todd, you’re telling the woman, “I accept the world how it is.” I think Gandhi used the same technique.

The lights were turned on and we were instructed to stand up and break into groups of three. Another friend of Taco Boy’s had sat next to us in the back row, and so he became our third group member. He was cute, actually, and seemed charming – but had been diligently taking notes through the seminar, which seems like a wild red flag.

I was not very good at “Yes, and” statements, and in case you’ve never tried it, it’s a thoroughly unnatural way to hold a conversation. Also, with the lights on and everyone out of their seats, I felt much more uncomfortable, and was much more noticeable than I had been while sitting in the back row, in the dark.

You get a lot of looks as the only female attendee in a room of over one hundred men who have paid several hundred dollars to learn how to meet women.

Looking around the room, though, most of the men seemed to be well-dressed and at least somewhat attractive. I wondered why they thought I was there, and also why they were there – frankly, if some of them had approached me in a bar, without using one of Todd’s idiotic “openers,” I wouldn’t necessarily have turned them down.

After a few torturous moments of our Yes, ands, we moved onto “I love” and “I hate” statements. Todd instructed us to start off every sentence with either one, and to say the first thing that came to mind, no matter how idiotic. I was slightly better at these. Taco and Friend encouraged me to think of this as a free improv class, but Friend told me I should probably work on my “cold approach” – i.e., approaching strangers on the street with the intention of hitting on them. I told him that was a skill I was never going to use. (By the way, no indication of whether Friend had paid to attend the seminar, or had snuck his way in for free also, although I suspect he did the former.)

Todd kept staring at me without blinking, and the amount of eye contact became increasingly unnerving.

Lastly, we did “qualifying statements,” in order to get our targets emotionally invested. Todd, unblinking, assured us that they could be as stupid as we wanted them to be! It doesn’t matter, just say anything! They had to follow the format, “You’re so _____, it’s like _____.” My date thought of a charming one: “You’re so stupid, it’s like pathetic.” Todd pointed out one participant in the front row who was wearing an ugly patterned sweater: “You’re so sweatered up it’s like you’re a penguin!” Unfortunately, the young man was staring at me and didn’t realize Todd was talking to him. His fellow group member had to swat his arm to get his attention.

Another prime example, courtesy of Todd: “Your posture is so chill right now, it’s like you’re a Buddha!” The Buddha in question grinned and pumped his arms in the air, presumably ecstatic. There was some sad, scattered applause.

I refused to do a qualifying statement, so Friend started off, “Your hair is so carefree, it’s like fluttering blossoms blowing in the breeze.” Taco’s statement to Friend: “You’re so racially ambiguous, it’s like you could be in a Target commercial.”

A quick note: Yes, ands, can be a way to carry on a conversation, however awkward. And “I love” and “I hate” statements aren’t difficult to think of, nor do they feel particularly unnatural to say. But the third exercise has a distinct I’m-trying-to-hit-on-you vibe. To watch a group of one hundred allegedly-über-hetero men try to seduce each other is something I can’t recommend highly enough. They were practically yelling across the room to each other, trying to stand as far away as possible. There were a lot of feet shuffling, looking at the floor, aggressively crossed arms, and averted glances. The emotional investment was palpable.
Unfortunately, one of the event coordinators came up to Taco and I and indicated that we had to follow him, cutting off the third exercise for us. I stood around by the door while Taco and the coordinator talked – I got the sense that we were in trouble, but that the men would handle it for me. I was told to produce my ID, and then after it was returned to me, I was asked to take my phone and leave.

If attending the seminar wasn’t embarrassing enough, getting kicked out certainly was.

Turns out, Taco hadn’t really cleared it with his friend the assistant or Todd that he could attend for free. Until Todd was able to confirm that that was the case, we needed to either pay $300 each or leave. Seeing as they kicked us out at 9:15, and the seminar ended for the day at 9:30, paying didn’t seem quite worth it.

Taco had also told me that paying attendees were allowed to bring dates or girlfriends for free – a provision that makes fiscal sense to me because there aren’t likely to be that many men attending that have women to ask, and also because I doubt very many women are likely to go. While I have to admit that I think it’s a little hypocritical to be kicking out the only female attendee, to be fair, I was very clearly an interloper, and I’m sure my Jane Goodall-esque attitude didn’t help things much.

Either way, Taco and I left the hotel and he told me that he was going to get Chipotle and then try to return to the seminar. I was invited to join, and to go clubbing with him and the literally six foot tall Tiesto-grinding model, but I declined both. We hugged awkwardly, he told me to text him, and I haven’t heard from him since – which is assuredly for the best.

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[1] I tried Googling “Tod versus Todd” but didn’t find any significant results, although there is a doctor with the unfortunate name of Tod Todd in California who specializes in holistic treatments and has written a fictional thriller novel titled 444 The Key to the Island. FYI. (But seriously, you guys must intuitively know the difference between a Tod and a Todd, right? I can’t be alone in this, can I?) (Back)

[2] In the interest of Todd’s privacy, I won’t call him by last name, although it’s only a quick Google away if you’d like to attend the seminar yourself. You’ll know it’s him by the awful hair. (Back)

[3] Todd admitted that nothing happened with the woman with the boyfriend, and an audience member asked what happened with the NYU freshman, at which time he reluctantly stated that he only hung out with her and her roommate before leaving. A third video showed him picking up two dancers in Times Square. One dancer was very clearly uninterested in him and his shtick⁴ and when that came across in the video, Todd interjected that she was “much less hot” than her friend, who was coincidentally fawning all over Todd. Even so, Todd took both women out for coffee, got the hotter friend’s name and number, and kissed her. Then she and her friend drove back home to Jersey and that was the end of that.

It’s exceedingly curious to me that Todd chose those three videos, which are evidence of him spending considerable amounts of time on a total of four women, to only net one quick kiss in return. I wanted to stay after the seminar’s conclusion to ask him what his goal is. Is it collecting numbers? Is it sleeping with these women? Is it creating a relationship with them? (Back)

[4] Another note: when Todd could tell that a woman was on the brink of rejecting him, he would demonstrate his own “value” but saying something like, “I mean, if sexy, charismatic, confident, funny, successful guys like me aren’t your type, that’s fine and I’ll leave you alone.” But the really astonishing part was that it seemed to work! These women would feel insulted that he would insinuate that they don’t have good taste in men, and in another instance of “sneaking one past the goalie,” they’d then be drawn into continuing the conversation. (Back)

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Kathryn Leslie is a human being living in Brooklyn.

Young and in Love

It was June of 2012, and everyone in my family was getting boned except for me. My younger brother, Willy P, had his first girlfriend, who I’ll call Alejandra. Alejandra was hot. I mean, Gillian Anderson-level hot. If I were a lesbian who didn’t know that my brother had been in her orifices, I would so be into her. Every time she visited, she always brought cake or cookies or something else she baked. And besides just being pretty and being able to cook (since women are useful for other things, too) she was from Easter Island and had travelled all over the world. She was a talented singer, excellent painter, and when she talked with you, she made you feel like the most interesting person in the world. I don’t know what she saw in him. Granted, he’s my brother, but he’s also the guy who didn’t know Buck was a dog when he read The Call of the Wild in 7th grade.

With the exception of getting into college and having my cat die first, I was behind my brother in achieving every milestone of adulthood. He had a real job (that wasn’t working at our mother’s office every summer) before me. He went to a college party the week before I started college. He had his driver’s license before me, a task that I blew off after I failed the test the first time. I shrugged it off that I’ll be going to NYU, not realizing that I might be home for the summers or moving to LA after graduation. Oops.

I have a cousin, whom I’ll call Ashley, who, as of June 2012, had never left New Jersey (with the exception of once going to New York City and once to Amish Country on a school trip). Her parents had recently gotten a divorce, so my dad thought it would be good to take her mind off things and take the family on a day trip to Washington, D.C. It was going to be fun. I had the week off from the airport where I worked. (I decided I was too old to be working for my mother and I got a job as an assistant teacher for this airport that taught autistic kids how to fly airplanes. The woman who ran it was the epitome of the American Dream. She used to smoke inside the airplanes. She had about nine kids and they all ran around the airport barefoot. One of them was autistic, so she decided to run a camp for autistic kids and have them fly 4-person airplanes to beaches and parks.) Every day was an adventure, but today was going to be an adventure where I wouldn’t die at the end. Or so I thought.

Ashley wasn’t that bad. She was a little socially awkward and learned about current events a year after they happened, but not too bad. She had this boyfriend, who I will call Gabe, who came over for 4th of July that year, and when I went to hang out with them and my brother and Alejandra, Gabe told me ten times I couldn’t because I didn’t have a date like the rest of them, which was weird, because we weren’t in middle school anymore. But they were madly in love, and Ashley had tattooed his name in gel pen on her arm.

The worst part about the day was going to be my dad’s girlfriend, who I’ll call Donna. I don’t want to compare myself to God, but it’s definitely a God vs. Lucifer situation whenever we’re in a room together. This woman made fun of me for crying on the car ride to my grandmother’s funeral, because “that’s not where you’re supposed to cry.” She threw piles of garbage into my room because my brother forgot to put the ketchup back into the fridge. She used to call my brother and I obese when we were younger, even though Wil wasn’t fat at all and I was just growing boobs like a normal 11-year-old girl. She had a handyman giving her estimates on our house, and when I needed to get to the job interview at the airport, his car was blocking my brother’s. I asked the man if he could move it because I needed to leave, and she flew into a red-faced rage about how I needed to respect people’s time. The man moved his car because he was, you know, normal.

Driving our crew to Washington, D.C. was my dad, who was still managing to drive a car after our family excursion the previous year to Honolulu left him blind in one eye because Germans never give up. Sometimes he makes funny jokes. Wil and I say he is a hybrid of George Costanza and Danny DeVito.

Then there was me, Rachel Petzinger, a soon-to-be junior at NYU who was just trying to live her life. Now that I’ve established everyone in the rented van, probably exactly like Anton Chekhov would have, I’m going to break down the trip using an inner monologue to explain my thoughts and some dialogue that happened during this early summer day in a sort of 24 style.

6 AM - 7 AM

Bruh, I’m awake now. I’m going to listen to some Kid Cudi because I just learned what Spotify is! Let me Instagram doing this, because I also just learned what Instagram is, too!

Uh-oh, I forgot cousin Ashley is sleeping in the room. Music woke her up. Oh, well. Ashley comes over to me and sits in my butterfly chair. “Erase Me” plays on my computer, and she only sings along when he says, “I keep on running, keep on running,” so that it looks like she knows the words to the song. I want to tell her, it’s okay, you don’t have to show off to me that you know how to pick up on a few words.

“Do you have sex?” she asks me.

“Huh?”

“Do you have sex?” she repeats.

“I’m not talking with this about you at 6 in the morning.”

She slaps my arm. “C’mon, tell me. Sex is awesome. I like sex.”

I shut off my computer and say to her, “That’s great. I’m going to take a shower,” and I escape to the bathroom.

Three minutes later I hear a knock on the door. It’s Willy P.

“I need to take a shower,” he grumbles through the door. I ignore him. We had a fight over the bathroom a few days ago that got a little out of hand, so now I always spend more time than I need in there.

I get out of the shower and there’s another knock at the door.

“Willy P, ya scrotum, leave me alone, I’ll be out in five minutes!” I yell.

Only it’s not Willy P. It’s Donna, and she’s mad at me for wasting water with my 4-minute shower. I wonder if it would be a waste of water to drown her.

I don’t realize that I say this out loud. Now my dad is mad at me.

The day is off to a good start.

7 AM - 8 AM

Alejandra’s parents arrive. They are nice people. We think that they are involved in some Chilean spy organization because they are pretty quiet about their personal business, and then sometimes they go away for weeks at a time, but that’s awesome because my family is as boring and suburban as can be and we don’t know any spies. I’m just chilling in the back of the van, playing with a lighter, thinking about putting myself out of my misery for the day, when they knock on the door and I greet them.

“So you’re going back to Easter Island on Monday?” I ask.

They nod their heads. We have that sort of discussion you have with people you’re on the brink of being comfortable around, except it’s useless because they’ll be gone forever in five days, taking Willy P’s sexy slam-piece with them. Then my dad comes out with a camera bag and has me put it in the trunk. He makes small talk in a high-pitched voice—you know, the kind of voice people use when they’re trying to be really nice, and it’s not like they’re anti-social, but they haven’t quite yet mastered the art of talking to people they’re not friends with in their normal voice.

My dad goes back inside to tell Donna to hurry up. Alejandra’s parents ask me what we’re going to see, and I explain to them that we will probably just go to the touristy stuff, because Ashley has never been anywhere outside of New Jersey, with the exception of two places. They are amazed by that.

Wil makes me move seats so he and Alejandra can spoon in the back. Ashley puts a helmet on her head because her mother warned her about my dad’s driving. And with that, the Petzingers are en route to Washington, D.C.!

8 AM - 9 AM

Driving. I invite Ashley to watch Slumdog Millionaire with me on my iPhone because she needs some culture.

If I never find love, then I would at least like to be the badass older sibling, as Salim is to Jamal. Who needs a Latika when you can have 1 million rupees?

9 AM - 10 AM

We stop at a rest stop in South Jersey. I pass by a Burger King along the way to the bathroom as Donna is behind me. She sees a heavyset woman, and says (which she thinks is under her breath), “Ugh, if I ever get to be that fat, just kill me.” I walk ahead of her.

Ashley looks like a poor baby animal lost in the rest stop. American rest stops are really only full of diddlers, truck drivers, bikers, happy families going on vacation, and angry families going on vacation. I buy me an iced coffee and her a Cinnabon because she has made some good progress. Ashley says her boyfriend really loves Cinnabon.

I go over to Willy P, who is on his phone as Alejandra is in the bathroom.

“Hey, bud.”

“Sup,” he says, without making eye contact.

“You gonna miss Alejandra?”

“Yup.”

A long silence. I take a Snapchat of him and draw a peener in his mouth. He is not amused, unlike usual. So I go back to the car and play the waiting game.

10 AM - 11 AM

We almost arrive in D.C. I regret drinking that iced coffee because now I really need to winky-tink. I ask my dad repeatedly to pull over but he doesn’t because we’re on a non-existent schedule.

“Rachel, help us find parking!” he yells.

“But that starts with P, and I have to pee!” I cry. It hurts. So I go on my phone and look up some tricks that have helped me to this day. Did you know that if you are sitting down, you are not supposed to cross your legs? That puts pressure on your parts, so you should sit with your legs separated. You are welcome.

We park, and it is a photo-finish as I run into a Subway and ask to use the bathroom. The cashier lets me go without buying a sandwich because D.C. is technically the south and people are pleasant there.

When we get out Ashley spots a Barnes & Noble. She asks if we can go in.

“You’re joking, right?” my dad asks. We walk past it.

11 AM – 12 PM

“I have cramps,” my lovely cousin announces as we stop at a deli.

“Kay,” my dad responds.

“What do you want us to do about that?” Donna asks.

“Can we go back?” Ashley suggests.

My dad laughs.

“What kind of cramps?” I ask her. “Cramp cramps or cramp cramps?”

So we go to a CVS. “Do you need lady-time stuff?” I ask her. She insists she is fine.

My dad makes me carry the big camera bag as we make our way to Capitol Hill.

12 PM – 1 PM

Wow. So that’s Capitol Hill, where Congress does its thing.

Ashley looks at her phone. My dad and Donna argue over a map as my brother and Alejandra lay down on the grass.

I remember this one time in 2009 when my class went to DC as part of a weeklong field trip. I was new to the school that year and really had only a handful of friends. There was this girl, Elyssa, who I thought was my bud, but then for some reason on that trip she flat-out stopped talking to me. It was weird. I remember on these steps three years before, after we got off and our teachers said to meet them back here in three hours, I was lost, since Elyssa was being such a bitch. Then a classmate came up to me, and I thought he was going to say I could walk with them, but then he just asked me to take some pictures of his group of friends.

I had this one really cool French teacher who was on the trip. Literally the only French teacher I ever had who never had that attitude that all French teachers have. But later that night we all gathered in front of the White House. I was with some group of people I didn’t really give a shit about, and she came up to me and pointed at a lit window in the White House and said, “Pensez-vous que Obama est là?”

I laughed, “Peut-être, oui.”

Then she introduced me to this group of people, who actually turned out to be people I still keep in contact with today.

I had this revelation on these steps of wisdom, if I can’t have a significant other, then I’ll help people! At least I could help my cousin when she only had me on the trip. My cousin was on her phone, shaking.

“Hey, cuz. What do you think of the city so far?”

“Huh? Yeah,” she responded.

1 PM – 2 PM

We make our way to some fountain. I sit with Ashley as she continues on about her boyfriend and how much she misses him and how she is so excited to go to the beach with him tomorrow.

“You know, beaches are great, but, like, aren’t you happy to be here? With your family?”

“Yeah, I guess. I like New York better. There are more streets.”

“We have literally been here for 2 hours. Isn’t it kind of cool, the buildings are what you see everyday on our money. Or the people? Everyone is super friendly. Or at least knowing you’re in the same city where there is so much of America’s history?”

“Yeah, well, I mean, the history is great.”

My cousin’s intelligent argument is disrupted by my brother yelling, “Alejandra!” Everyone in the city practically turns to see my brother jump into the water to save her digital camera she dropped in. Alejandra thanks him and laughs, “I’ll just go put it in rice when I get home.” She is pretty casual about it, while my brother and father ask her if it’s all right, treating it like it’s a baby about to go on life support. Ashley sniffles a little bit, because that’s something her boyfriend would have done. And she misses him. And can’t wait until they are at the beach tomorrow.

2 PM – 3 PM

The National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian is pretty far out. Alejandra told us we should buy space ice cream at the gift shop, which is really the only reason we went. My dad and Donna went off to go look at rocket ship stuff, and my brother and Alejandra fed each other their space cream. Ashley stared at them for more than an appropriate time, so I took her by the elbow to look at some airplane models.

I said something along the lines of, “Gee whiz, isn’t that airplane swell,” but when I turned I saw her crying. I had never before seen anyone cry over an airplane that wasn’t about to crash. “What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“Just seeing Wil and Alejandra feeding each other. It makes me miss Gabe.”

I tried to block her face, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed. “But, you’ll like, see him at the beach tomorrow. Willy P and Alejandra may never see each other again. She’s going back to Easter Island in five days, for Christ’s sake.”

Ashley shook her head. “You don’t understand. You’re not in love with anyone.”

“What do you do when you have to go to work? Or in school? Do you cry that you miss him then?”

“No, because he’s near me. He’s halfway around the world, now!”

3 PM – 4 PM

I alert my father to Ashley’s tears. He asks her what’s wrong, and she just says her cramps are really bad.

“Rachel, give her something.”

“Ashley, what do you need?”

“I’m fine! I just want to go home.”

I want to tell Ashley to give it up—my father is not one of those guys who would let a thing like cramps get in the way of a day trip. Perhaps Ashley had forgotten, but my father is blind in one eye, and he doesn’t let that stop him from flying airplanes, let alone driving a car. “Give it up, cousin,” I try to tell her with my telekinesis.

But it falls upon deaf ears and brain stems. My father shakes his head and says, “We’re not going home.”

“I would like to go to that Indian Museum,” Donna chimes in.

“Indian is not the preferred nomenclature. Native American, please,” I have to remind her. She is confused and whispers something to my dad.

4 PM – 5 PM

We watch some movie about oppression at the Native Museum of the American Indian. Ashley leaves, not because it bothers her how badly the white man had treated those different, but because she needs to talk to Gabe on her phone.

I tug on my dad’s sleeve. “Should I go out there?”

He shrugs. “She’s fine. Just watch the movie.”

We meet her outside afterwards, and my dad is not happy with Ashley because that movie had cost five dollars to get in. My dad asks her why she acts the way that she does, and Donna interrupts, patting her mouth like it’s a drum, chanting “Hey-yuh-yuh-yuh, hey-yuh-yuh-yuh.” A Native American family walks by, sees what she is doing, and they collectively shake their heads. To keep my laughter in, I run over to Willy P and Alejandra. My brother has his arm around her, but I think she put it there.

“Do you see what Donna is doing?”

Alejandra giggles. “I won’t miss her.”

Wil rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “I know he’s blind in one eye, but he still should see how retarded she is.”

The museum is about to close and my dad tells me to leave Willy P and Alejandra alone and watch Ashley just in time for Donna to visit the gift shop.

“I’m not bothering them,” I argue.

“It’s upsetting your cousin to see them together. Just keep her company – away from them.”

“This is bullshit. And I’m sorry. But I like Alejandra. Just because I’m not boning her doesn’t mean I won’t miss her when she’s gone either!”

It’s pointless arguing, though, and Ashley and I sit on a bench in the museum.

“It’s just hard to see them,” she keeps repeating.

A voice on the intercom announces that the museum will close in five minutes. Ashley grumbles, “I hate your dad’s girlfriend. She’s gonna get us locked in here.”

“Would you just chill out?”

“You don’t understand, Rachel!”

“Yeah, everyone keeps saying that to me.”

“If we get stuck here overnight, then I can’t go to the beach with Gabe tomorrow.”

“But we won’t—“

“You don’t have a boyfriend, you don’t understand.”

“I don’t need a boyfriend to understand that a museum won’t lock you in after they close.”

A minute passes. She wipes away a tear and says, “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Are you a lesbian?”

“What?! No. Why would you even ask me that?”

“You’re always talking about how hot Gillian Anderson is and stuff.”

“Oh my god, I haven’t even mentioned Gillian Anderson once on this trip.”

“Still, you do it a lot.”

“Gillian Anderson is a very attractive woman and I appreciate her accomplishments in film and television. Besides, I talk about Christoph Waltz all the time and nobody says anything.”

“Well, you’ve never had a boyfriend.”

I stand up and then passionately yell, “OH, I’M SORRY, I DIDN’T REALIZE THAT IN THE GROWN ASS ADULT HANDBOOK THAT IF YOU ARE 20 AND STILL HAVEN’T HAD SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH A GUY, THEN YOU ARE AUTOMATICALLY A LESBIAN.”

That made Ashley cry a river, and my dad wasn’t too thrilled about that.

5 PM – 6 PM

We try to find the car for about an hour. This makes Ashley upset because if we can’t find the car, we can’t get back home. My father wants me to hold the camera bag on my back in lieu of being Ashley’s sole advisor, but at some point I cough up a storm and Ashley hits me really, really hard on my shoulder four or five times, probably not realizing that you can’t just slap a person anywhere on their body and they will stop coughing.

It has been forty-five minutes and we still cannot find the car. We grab the attention of a homeless man, who speaks to my dad in Spanish. That’s when Alejandra comes in and she and him have a conversation. At some point after Alejandra says something and he looks at Ashley and laughs. I meant to ask Alejandra later what they were talking about. He got us to our car and my dad gave him a granola bar.

6 PM – 7 PM

We get in the car and assume our usual positions, which means Ashley sulks in her seat. My dad drives around some city sights that we didn’t get to see, just for Ashley.

We pass the Lincoln Memorial. “Hey, Ashley, look, it’s the Lincoln Memorial.”

“Great.”

We pass the Washington Monument. “Hey, Ashley, look, it’s the Washington Monument.”

“Super.”

Next is the White House. “Hey, Ashley, think Obama is in there?”

No response.

7 PM – 8 PM

Fell asleep, woke up to my brother putting a lime in my mouth.

8 PM – 9 PM

We stop somewhere in Maryland to get dinner. My brother and Alejandra hold hands the whole time, and my dad, Donna and I, all try to separate their hands as a joke. My dad takes a knife and pretends to go all Norman Bates on him. Ashley drags me to the bathroom with her.

“I hate Donna,” she grumbles. “That museum stuff with the Native Americans, that wasn’t cool.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t, but you don’t have to deal with her on a daily basis, and she has been surprisingly okay on this trip.”

Then she throws a paper towel in the mirror. “Can you tell your brother to stop holding hands with Alejandra?”

I walk out and say to my brother what our cousin said. Then I suggest perhaps the entire restaurant should have a giant orgy on this table. Willy P likes that idea, minus the fact that I would probably just be watching. Ashley orders just a plate of French fries for dinner, while my meal has a side of French fries, like normal. When she finished, she just kept eating all the fries off my plate. My brother had my back and put up a wall of condiments between the two of us.

9 PM – 10 PM

We drive home. At this point, Donna sits next to me because my dad wants to talk to Ashley about some things. The four of us have our own conversation about the day, then I sit in between Willy P and Alejandra in the backseat and tell her about the details of Wil’s diary when he was little.

“What was in it?” Donna asks, feeling like one of the cool kids for once in her life.

“Dear Diary! I just got my first period!” Willy P recites.

From all the way up front, Ashley says, “That’s funny, Wil, because normally only girls get periods.”

A long silence. “Shut the fuck up, Ashley!” he shouts.

I’m surprised that Donna doesn’t say, “Watch your language.” My dad looks in the mirror and sees I’m not in my seat, so he makes me go back.

10 PM – 11 PM

About ten minutes from the house, my dad breaks the silence in the car and says to Ashley, “Hey, it’s getting late. I don’t think you should drive back to your house tonight.”

“NO! I HAVE TO.”

“It’s dark out. You’re tired, we’re all tired. You can leave in the morning.”

“Uncle Bill, I have to leave tonight!”

“Ashley, it’s dangerous. There are weirdos out there.”

“Uncle Bill, I deal with weirdos all the time!”

Then I butt in. “Ashley, you live in Flemington. The only weirdo you deal with is your father.”

We pull into our driveway, and because it is on a hill and of the way it is structured, a car cannot get around it if another one is parked on top. My dad stays right there.

She flies into hysteric tears, but my dad calls his sister and she insists her daughter stays there. Alejandra’s parents show up and see Ashley crying in our basement.

“What happened to her?” her dad asks.

“She misses her boyfriend,” I tell them.

Alejandra’s mother looks at the floor. “Ungrateful, she is,” she mutters.

With all the chaos going on in the back, I almost forget that this is the last time I might see her parents.

“Will you ever visit?” I ask.

They smile. “For your brother, we would change the weather!”

Alejandra comes over. “I think I’m coming over tomorrow. Good luck with your cousin,” she says, and hugs me.

11 PM – 12 AM

Ashley reminds me of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre with all the sounds coming from the basement. My dad comes upstairs, wiping his forehead, like I imagine a guy does when he’s witnessing his wife giving birth or something.

“What’s wrong with her?” I ask.

“She’s just going through a difficult time. We need to get a new rocking chair.”

“You know, I go through rough times, but I don’t make things miserable for anyone else.”

“Rachel, one day, you will have a boyfriend, and you’ll understand.”

“Man, I can’t wait to have a boyfriend and finally understand what it is that makes people so crazy.”

He puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “I love you, Rachel. Truly. Don’t go downstairs,” and he goes to bed.

I go downstairs to see what all the fuss is about. Ashley has barricaded herself in and has broken a lamp and a rocking chair.

“They don’t understand… they don’t understand…” I hear from a corner.

“Hey, buddy,” I say slowly. “You want some Tylenol?”

“No… I didn’t have cramps. I just wanted to go home.”

I should have known she didn’t really have cramps. She’s one of those chicks who every time she’s over says she’s on her lady-time.

Upstairs, Willy P does pull-ups in his room.

“Hey, buddy,” I say.

“You wanna get lunch with me and Alejandra tomorrow?”

“Nothing would so much as pleaseth your fine maiden greater.”

“Stop.”

He lets go of the bar and gets in his bed.

“Where are we getting lunch?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. We might not. But Alejandra wants to see you.”

“Will you miss her?” I ask him quietly.

He looks me in the eye and nods.

“You should lock your door tonight,” I say.

“Why, are you gonna have your way with me?”

“No. It’s just that there’s a crazy person in our basement and there are knives in the kitchen. And you’re an asshole, but you’re my little asshole, and I don’t want you to die for a long time.”

He laughs. I leave his room and I hear the door close and the lock set in place. Then I lock my door.

As I fall asleep, I hear the moans of a wounded animal rise from our basement.

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Rachel Petzinger is a writer and comedienne. She writes and stars in Dear Rachel, a comedy web series.