Introduction by Natalia Lehaf

When I first saw Jennifer’s art, I was immediately captivated. I haven’t seen an artist evoke raw human emotions with tiny objects – things – like this ever before. Her work is endlessly beautiful and unique, and her ability to create new worlds in her miniature diorama photography is eerily inviting. The fragments of Jennifer’s work are composed with tactful and resourceful planning, as she prioritizes the time and thought going into her work from the very conception. Once she has an idea, she begins to hand-make accessories or meticulously select the exact item to complete her vision. These concepts laid out on a 1:12 scale speak the stories of her thoughts and experiences. Jennifer is a true storyteller, mirroring the intimate details of her life onto the figures in her projects. It takes courage to reflect, confront, and defeat one’s secrets and fears; it takes heart to turn that process into a calculated formula for artistry.

The following has been edited and condensed from an interview with Jennifer.

I put a lot of my anxieties and longings and nostalgia and darker moods into my work. I fixate on things; if something sets me off it’ll be in the back of my head for a long time.

Babies

You see her fear and you always want to know what’s going on.

I grew up in a traditional family and while I never felt any pressure, there was an expectation to grow up, get a job, get married, and have kids.

I decided not to have kids because, aside from never feeling like I was meant to be a mother, I always had this fear of giving birth and having a child in my life. I wanted to use this doll – and the way she always looks scared – as an extension of my decision to not have a baby. You see her fear and want to know what’s going on. I put her in traditional baby environments, but always in an enclosure to portray feeling trapped.

This is a doll I got from the Dollar Store when I was little. It is about an inch-and-a-half tall. All I remember is finding her and putting a dress on her. I don’t remember ever consciously deciding to keep her. I’ve been really intrigued by her because the way she is painted makes her look creepy. I wanted to keep it simple but also play with the color pink to represent the [societal] tradition of always assigning colors to gender, but also to contrast the fear with a lighter color.

Routine

I wanted him to be completely emotionless, expressionless; you can ascribe whatever you want to this form.

Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in a routine and I’m not always content with that. Not to say that this guy always represents me, but I wanted to represent the idea of being stuck and going through the motions. He’s about an inch-and-a-half tall and made of polymer clay and wire. I wanted him to be completely emotionless, expressionless; you can ascribe whatever you want to this form, but at the same time, he’s completely lost everything about himself. You watch him in a 9 to 5 setting. People spend most of their time at work and then come home and have to decide, “Do I have time to go out, or should I just watch TV, eat, and go to bed?” I wanted to keep it to those very specific tasks.

The longest part in anything I do is the beginning; I think about an idea for forever. I plan out every tiny little detail before I start doing anything. I made the figure in one day and he sat there for a few weeks while I gathered the supplies for his environments. After I had everything I needed, I did one thing at a time. The entire series from concept to finish took about a month or two.

Heaven and Hell

These images were presented as a series, but I did one image at a time over an extended period of time. It’s something I keep coming back to. I grew up in a very conservative Christian family – and I didn’t realize until recently, but a lot of my struggle with that is never feeling like I could fit into it very well. I never felt like I was ever being a Christian because I didn’t understand how to be.

Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out who I am and what I think about certain things, and it’s made me think about the effect my past and the household I grew up in have on me. These feelings have come to the surface a lot, and are things I’ve wanted to explore more.

I have always had this deep fear of Hell – and it’s something that I really needed to sit down and reconcile that I was not going to be afraid of anymore. Even when I decided I wasn’t a Christian anymore, I thought, “Oh, no – this is definitely making me go to Hell.” My process in making this was also my process in deciding not to be afraid of Hell. So, this is a guy approaching an altar full of flames with a demon eating a person at the center, and blurred on the right side is a guy falling off a cliff.

I wanted to keep the tones fire-oriented and warm for hell – the red, yellow, orange – with a black background. I was partly inspired by two medieval courses in college; one was called “The Art of the Apocalypse.” So the way I depicted hell is similar to the way it is depicted in medieval art.

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You can see the church as a light in this darkness, or you can see it as “there’s something wrong here – something dark in this supposed light.”

I wanted to pose this church as a mysterious place. Why is it there? Why is it at the bottom of a hill? And then light it at night, spotlighted, so you notice the church but then you have that deep, dark light coming from the entrance. You can see the church as a light in this darkness - when I showed it to my mom, that’s what she automatically saw it as – or you can view it as “there’s something wrong here – something dark in this supposed light.”

I was shopping for another series when I came across this statue with nothing drawn on it. Since my time growing up, I’ve really been intrigued by religious typography. So I wanted to pose this one like an old, religious painting. I painted the figure and used different colors to represent the idea of Mary:

White for purity
Green for fertility
Blue for faith/Heaven

Jesus has the white for purity, and Mary has some of the white on her but I also wanted to show all of the other features with the other colors.

Melancholy

The doll featured was the inspiration for this whole series coming together. I used a doll with very defined feet because I knew I wanted to focus on her feet and I wanted there to be toes. Originally, I was going to call this series “soft focus,” but I decided to go with the feel of everything, which is melancholy. One of my main goals with this was for each image to represent an emotion, and I liked the idea of giving dolls – little figures – that voice for people to relate to them. I project myself in her to an extent – not things I am feeling now, but things that I’ve felt at some point.

I didn’t keep it all in focus because I wanted it to be a motion of everything being swept away, in a dreamlike state. She’s finally found her peace and she’s reveling in it.

I’ve been thinking about the word “dry” for a long time. It’s probably more of a Midwestern thing, but this image shows a time when it’s dry and hot, and even though it hasn’t rained in a while, you’re still sitting on your porch drinking tea or lemonade. I wanted to create an image that embodies the feeling of waiting. I focused on her feet more so you can see the detail of the porch and the expanse before her. You see that she is just sitting there waiting for this change.

The twigs are the focus of this image because they are a reflection of what’s going on inside of her. It looks like a scarf on her, in a suffocating way.

The Chair-O-Plane illustrates my favorite thing to feel – the wind. There is a type of joy when everything is fading away and you are not focused on anything else but the feeling of the wind. I really romanticize this feeling in my mind. I had an idea of this icon and everything being calm for a moment; it’s lit brightly to give a dreamlike reflection.

Jennifer Nichole Wells is an artist out of Jacksonville, FL. She creates small-scale tableaus to be transformed through her camera lens. Her images serve as explorations of loneliness, depression, anxiety, nostalgia, hopelessness, and hope. You can find more of her work on her website, Twitter, and Instagram.

interview

A document of the moment: an interview with Jake Fertig

Adam Cecil · September 13, 2015

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Adam Cecil: First off, do you want to just explain what you do as an artist?

Jake Fertig: That’s a question that I’ve been trying to figure out for myself for a while. The way to formulate my interests and the work that I do into one collective unit has been something that I’ve been thinking about consciously a lot, especially in the last few months.

Jake Fertig is an independent filmmaker.

Jake Fertig is a musician.

Jake Fertig is a writer.

Jake Fertig is an actor.

Jake Fertig is an artist, living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

Jake: The biggest project I’m working on, that I spend every day working on, is a feature film called Howeds.

I’m working on it with my girlfriend, Emily Dalmas. Frankly, she’s the best person I’ve ever met. We wrote it together, we’re producing it together, we both act in it. I’m directing it, I play the main character in it, and its semi-autobiographical.

Howeds is about my high school experience. It’s about a group of Jewish-American teenage guys who are very sheltered and a little bit teased in their community. It’s kind of an anti-Coming-of-Age movie.

That’s the main project we’re working on. We’re anticipating releasing it towards the end of next year.

Jake Fertig graduated from NYU Tisch with a BFA in Film in 2013. Since then, his day job has been producing video content for various companies and organizations. He currently works at Mashable. Howeds will be his first feature film.

He met Emily during his second year at NYU. Emily is also a graduate of the film program. Since graduating from NYU in 2013, she has worked as an NBC Page and is currently a Field Production Assistant for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

They live together in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Jake: There’s this slate of projects that I’ve tried to put in one linear order. Our production company is called Perestroika, and Howeds is the first project. The second project that I want to work on is an album that I’ve been writing for the last two years.

My other main interests are singing and songwriting and music production. I’ve been in a band for the last five years called Marguerito. We just released our latest album in May. Basically, we’re an indie rock band. I’m in it with three other guys that I met in high school.

I’ve been trying to formulate — How do I not do these two separate things at the same time?, especially when I’m working a full-time job. How do I put it together into one thing?

What I’ve settled on is music videos. We shot two music videos for the last album. From there, I started to formulate this idea of creating videos that support the music in a very specific and concrete way. Most music videos that I see don’t really relate to the source material very strongly. They’re a completely separate idea from the music itself.

So, the next project I’m working on is an album, that I want to release under my own name, called Essential Problem. I have all the songs written, and right after we finish shooting Howeds, while it’s in editing, I’m going to record them. Then, I’m going to shoot music videos for each song on the record so that it’ll play as a movie or as a straight-forward narrative. They’ll all fit within the same narrative of what this record is about, which is a very personal record about my experience over the past two or three years, mostly in my personal life:

the start of my relationship with my girlfriend (we’ve been dating for about two and a half years)
the complications at the beginning of our relationship:
- just being able to get to that point of vulnerability with someone and
- really trusting them.

For me, the whole idea of Essential Problem was this question of, like, Do I have some kind of problem that’s going to prohibit me from being able to fully invest in this relationship? and trying to process that. That’s what this record is about, and the film version of it.

I know that was a very lengthy answer.

Adam: When I watched Honored by the Sign at the Cinema, I noticed that exact thing you were just describing, where the music video really concretely backs up the lyrics in the song. How do you make that work? What I thought was really striking was that the family in the video, it seemed like, I don’t know if that was your family…

Jake: The parents were my parents. The little sister in the song is inspired by the little sister of one of my best friends, and she’s in the video.

It’s supposed to be representative of the culture of the people that I grew up with in Wayne, New Jersey. I was born in Queens and my family moved to suburban New Jersey when I was eight years old. It was only about a half-hour before you came that I really started to fully realize that I really felt like an outsider a lot of my time growing up in Wayne. I think it’s partially because I’m Jewish and from Queens, but I didn’t even realize that I felt a little bit like an outsider by being Jewish in New Jersey because, you know, it’s not Wyoming.

Basically, I saw this sign, and it said, “Happy Birthday Michelle” on it, and I was like, “This is so representative of the culture of this town, that’s such a depressing way to have your birthday celebrated." In reality, it’s kind of a nice thing.

Adam: I felt that from the song and the video, that duality of, oh, that’s really sweet but also really fucking depressing.

Jake: Exactly! So the first half of the song is every shitty thing I felt and could think of, and the second half is totally inspired by my friend’s little sister and their relationship. I could see the joy on his face whenever she would enter a room. She’s the light of the family. So I was trying to find a little bit of beauty, God, light in that world.

Adam: I feel like I haven’t seen a music video quite like this, and I’m wondering if you have a specific inspiration for it. Where, exactly, did the genesis of this idea come from? Why did you want to do this?

Jake: It felt intuitive. I’m sure there are a million reference points. But I don’t really know. I was happy with how Honored came out and I feel like this is a good idea. Most albums that I love have a sense of narrative, even if it’s not so obvious or linear, it’s just that… you know what it’s about. There’s a clear story and development to it. And this idea, I have a strong sense that it’s going to work. It’s tailored to my skill set. I can do A and B so why not try to do it all in one? This is a unique piece of work just because of the unity of vision throughout the whole thing.

Adam: Were you happy with the way people responded to Honored? Did you feel like you got a good reaction from that?

Jake: Definitely. Truthfully, all the stuff we put out… I’m still figuring out how to get it beyond the social media that I know.

The commute from their full-time jobs back to their Park Slope apartment is one of the only breaks that Jake and Emily get in the day. When they arrive back home, they are greeted by their second job: producing a motion picture. Off of the bedroom is a small office. This is where their shelves of camera and sound equipment live. Propped up on the desk behind their computer is a large poster for Civil Servant, the web series written, directed, and edited by Jake (he also starred in it). Emily produced the majority of the series, co-wrote episodes with Jake, and played a supporting character. When I saw the poster, it was still wrapped in loose plastic, presumably from their move one-and-a-half weeks prior.

Jake: This poster, to me, is a testament… this is the thing that we worked on, harder than anything. It took three years of work… the last episode was seen by like, 200 people — less than that, actually.

Civil Servant debuted in late November of 2014. The sixth and final episode was posted in late December. It has, as of writing, 163 views on YouTube.

Jake: Freshman year of college, I didn’t have that many film friends. But sophomore year of film school, I immediately met Emily, Martin Pohl — some of my best friends, and the funniest and smartest people that I feel like I’ve met at school. It was like an explosion. That’s the first thing about Civil Servant, is that it’s all friends. It was Emily, Marty, Paul Head, Kristen Laffey, Jake Lindeman, Trevor Silverstein, Joe Gallo, Chloe Jury-Fogel, Paul Head… I’m sure I’m forgetting people.

I wanted to do something outside of class. Civil Servant was that thing.

The thing I was most excited about was creating plot and narrative. My favorite stuff is The Sopranos, Mad Men; I love the way that really amazing Golden Age of TV type stuff uses misdirection to create seasonal arcs. They do these things where they’re planning these stories, and you don’t even realize that these stories are being developed and by the end you’re like, “Oh, it’s been all about this the whole time and actually it’s been present.” It feels true to life.

The other thing that I was excited about was working with these people who I thought were really funny. It was just so hard to do. We were doing it all guerrilla, after hours. The production value, it started to get really difficult to maintain towards the end of it. If you look at the poster, there are four directors of photography. It was just absurd.

We started filming in February of 2012. We shot it for a year and a half. Editing took a year. I was doing it, for the most part, by myself, although a few people worked on different episodes on their own. It just took a while. It became a good lesson for Howeds. I learned from my old roommate, Jason Moss, this idea of trying to preserve that feeling of a first listen or a first viewing, that feeling of immediacy when you’re responding to something, because that’s the only thing that will connect you to what a first time viewer will see. I lost that with Civil Servant. It was really hard to get it back. So I’m not editing Howeds. Joe Gallo, who edited one of the episodes of Civil Servant, is editing the whole thing.

Long form stuff… it’s hard, it’s different, when you don’t have the resources to do long form stuff. And it’s like… it’s hard not to judge things on the merit of how many Facebook Likes it gets, which is such a ridiculous, non-demonstrative way of seeing whether it’s good or not. And Civil Servant, it’s supposed to be straight narrative, and yet, it didn’t even get seen. But I don’t feel like it was unsuccessful. I don’t feel like I could really evaluate based on how many people saw it or loved it.

If it weren’t for Civil Servant, I couldn’t do Howeds.

Adam: Like you said, it’s hard to have the resources at this stage, and I wonder, in your head, what do you feel resource cramped about, and in what ways do you feel like that hampers your abilities? There are, especially with filmmaking, a lot of tools out there. I know a lot of people who do film and video stuff and they get frustrated because they think, “Oh, if I just had this camera,” or another tool, then the art would be better.

Jake: I know what you mean. Well, preface this by saying that I definitely believe that limitations set you free. In the worst case, just make whatever you’re doing a document of where you’re at. Compared to thirty or forty years ago, we have so much access to resources. You can always have more. Everybody always wants more. You just have to make it work, with whatever you have, and make the best of it. Those constraints will be a document.

The most important resource, without compare, is people. Before even going into anything else, I’m just going to harp on this for a second: Emily (and I think she can hear me right now) is God’s gift to me. Besides being my best friend and the best person I know, working with Emily has changed everything for me. Working on Howeds with Emily… we both work incredibly hard on it. It’s like we’re two heads that are constantly bouncing back and forth on all of the creative and all of the product elements. It’s amazing to be able to have that conversation outside of your own brain and to be met with someone who has a ton of their own ideas. That’s the best thing.

Jake has reason to appreciate people as a resource; right now, none of the cast or crew of Howeds is getting paid (including Jake and Emily). All of the money is going into the production, food, transportation, etc. And all of that is very, very expensive. Jake was uncomfortable when we talked about paying people. It was obvious that he wished he had enough money to give them the salaries they deserved.

The money for Howeds has come from two sources: Jake’s own savings (it took him two years to save enough to fund one quarter of Howeds’ production) and from soliciting family and friends. When Jake and I talked, he and Emily were in the beginning stages of planning a crowdfunding campaign, which will, by the time this is published, be on Indiegogo.

Jake: Art is such a funny thing. Emily and I had gone to a session on fundraising in the arts, and this guy was basically saying that being nervous about asking for money is – if you go down the line – related to questioning the value of your work.

I’m definitely a believer that art should be functional. I like channeling that feeling of What is this for? What is the purpose of this?

For Howeds, I want my message to reach people who are in suburban communities. And, to sum up what the movie is about: Howeds is about how oppressed groups tend to revisit, through this “us vs. them” mentality, some of the same persecution that that they faced and project it onto others. It’s through the lens of the Jewish-American experience. Jewish kids who are teased can be xenophobic and don’t even really realize how they’re prejudiced against women or minorities. And they suffer for it. My hope is to, through this lens, create a sense of empathy for these characters and position some kind of thesis as to why this behavior goes on.

Emily and I went to Israel a month ago. I had felt for a while that Jewish-American culture was something that I didn’t feel comfortable touching with a ten-foot pole. And then I realized that, you know, I always knew that Howeds was a Jewish movie, but I sometimes felt uncomfortable, because, for me, I feel like there’s a golden rule of not writing about characters that I don’t love. Howeds is cultural criticism. After we went on Birthright (which has its own share of propaganda, but it was amazing to be in Israel), I felt more comfortable with Howeds being a Jewish movie. Cultural criticism is what Judaism is about. This is one voice moving forward Judaism. I’m not an extremely religious person, but I feel like I’m culturally Jewish and I’m proud to be culturally Jewish. I feel like being Jewish connects me to the world rather than separates me. I think, whether you’re atheist or religious, everybody believes that the world is bigger than themselves. So, to me, it gave me this sense of purpose. Howeds is a Jewish movie, it’s a criticism, it’s one voice in this movement, and hopefully that will have a functional effect.

I’ve been working on a song called “I Belong,” and it’s about my realization that, for me, I don’t feel anymore that art is a vanity project. I used to feel bad when I thought, “All I want to do is make my own projects.” But I know that I belong, I know that my ideas and my messages, even if people are not clamoring for them, need to come out, because I deem them important. Even if it’s just my voice in a crowd of voices.

With some of the same friends who helped make Civil Servant and are helping make Howeds, Jake and Emily made Key Party, a short comedic film, for the 2013 Tisch 48-Hour Film Festival. Key Party is not only funny: the character beats feel sincere even when they’re completely absurd. It was, to put it in Jake’s words, “lightning in a bottle,” a complete amalgamation of the talents of those involved.

Jake has a complicated relationship with comedy. “When I was in elementary school, I felt like my way of getting in with people who didn’t really care about the real me was through making jokes.” That feeling hasn’t really left. Whenever he posts a new What’s Good? video – a series of shorts where he asks various people “What’s good?” – people seem “more responsive to [him] playing a character that makes a fool of myself" than to his more serious work.

And yet, he keeps coming back to it, posting new What’s Good? videos frequently enough to keep the series active. Howeds will have humor as well, as did Civil Servant before it. Humor, Jake tells me, is just another human emotion. For a young filmmaker struggling to make people care about his art, it may also be an easy way to connect to people, to make his work accessible. What I imagine keeps the elementary school boy inside of Jake awake at night is the idea that they won’t stick around to care about anything else.

Adam: I want to go back, all the way to Shofar Away, which I really enjoyed. Knowing what you just said about Howeds and the Jewish-American experience, how did you think about Shofar Away at the time? And now that you have the further realization of what you understand about yourself and how the Jewish-American experience affects your film output, what do you feel about that? Give me a before and after.

Jake: Well, I didn’t want to make that movie. It was for my Intermediate Class, at Tisch, and I wanted to do the final episode of Civil Servant as my project. Emily and I, we had the same professor. His name is Boris Frumin, and I feel like I learned more from him than any other teacher I’ve ever had. It wasn’t fun being in his class… he was very aggressive. He’s Latvian, always said, “No, no, no.” At the time, I could do a much better Boris impression.

He would talk through your movies while they showed, and to some degree, I felt like he was a little detached. But for the most part, he was ridiculously incisive with his criticism. He could immediately diagnose the problems that you had on set by looking at your final footage. He was just really thoughtful. He connected me to the history of cinema. There are just some truths that are eternal. This dude changed my conception of thinking about film. Before Boris, I thought film was about interesting dialogue, character beats, and story things. Boris taught me that everything is blocking and staging and everything else in the film is an extension of that. I’m forever indebted to him for that.

Boris was preaching, “Do things that are original, do things that are based on a specific type of experience,” he preached cultural stuff and interesting props. So that was it. Let’s track this shofar.

I don’t like doing things for class. Whatever your heart desires, it’s being warped by this craft exercise. I’m a big believer in learning by doing. But if you set up a craft exercise as a craft exercise, immediately there’s some separation. You don’t have truly full stakes. I feel like I need to have completely full stakes in it for me to get the lesson learned, even if it ends up being a failure. That’s the only way I’m going to try to my hardest, if I really feel like it’s full stakes. When I fail, it will still be a craft exercise, so why just make it a craft exercise? I know I’m going to fail at some point and learn something for the future, so why not do it with my whole heart?

It was based on my friend Jake’s story — they were both at my Rosh Hashanah dinner and Jake, the whole time, hid upstairs watching football on his computer and my other friend, Jason, jokingly flirted with one of my cousins the entire time. I thought it would be funny to combine it all into one thing. And, to me, connected to your question, I think Shofar Away was about feeling like an outsider in my own culture. I feel conflicted about Judaism, but I feel proud to be culturally Jewish and I don’t feel like my beliefs as a Jew are much different from anyone else’s beliefs in any other religion. I like the idea of connecting to everyone and everything, or striving to, rather than focusing on points where we’re different. Jewish just happens to be my identity. And I’m proud of it. That’s how I feel now, at least, but looking back… a lot of it was like, yeah, it was kind of growing pains.

I had a sixteen minute cut of it, originally, and I was I thought it was an opus. I was like, “This is amazing!” I brought it into class and thought, “I’m going to blow minds.” And then Boris shit on it. He told me to cut half the scenes and he told me that most of the scenes were undershot. I shot every scene in one take. I thought it was going to be a cool conceit, and it worked sometimes but it didn’t work as the whole thing.

Then I edited it too much, according to his notes. I got obsessed about it. I would send a cut to him after class was over and he would send me ten notes and I would do all of them and I did that over and over again. There’s a moment, in one of the cuts, it’s like a Psycho moment, a kind of Hitchcock or Kubrick thing, when he picks up the shofar, the film goes into slow motion and it gets really serious and dramatic, like he’s doing something really awful. When I showed it to the class, that was the part where everybody laughed. I wished I’d kept it in, but Boris said it was stylistically inconsistent. Marty gave me the note that I should’ve just listened to the laughter — if an audience is reacting, go for it! I wish I had done that differently. I feel like the climax of it is very downplayed.

Adam: To me, actually, that was one of the strengths of it.

Jake: Aaaah, that’s interesting.

Adam: I feel like the entire story was incredibly downplayed, and yet at the end of it, you feel, watching it, like the outsider. You feel like you are not of this world. I felt vaguely uncomfortable the entire time I was watching it, in a good way. I felt that I supposed to feel that way.

Jake: Yeah. *laughs* All my mom’s Jewish friends, when they saw it, were like, “Oh, we like Jakey’s stuff but I didn’t get Shofar Away.” I mean, I’m happy that you liked it. I felt, I guess, looking back, I don’t think that fondly on it. Some of the jokes are just convoluted. I’m happy I made it. Personally, I think Howeds is a step above. Not that there is a better or worse, but those were just different times.

Adam: It’s a document of the moment.

Jake: Exactly.

Adam: You should look at it with fresh eyes, though.

Jake: Yeah. *laughs* Yeah, yeah.

You can view all of Jake’s films and keep up with new projects, including Howeds, on his website.

Letter from the Editor, Fall 2015

Natalia Lehaf · September 13, 2015

"FYI," I typed. "Everyone is getting married."

I sent this text message to a few couples I third-wheeled so often that an invitation to join the inevitable wedding party was an expectation.

The responses varied, but not by much; some couples disregarded the text by casually changing the subject, while others sent me a private message ("where are you going with that text?").

“I’m making sure you are focusing on your future,” I typed back to such perplexed texts. My goal was to start the conversation and plant the idea in their minds. This was for selfish reasons, not an appreciation of and respect for love's most symbolic event. I am always on the chase for reasons to celebrate: I’m the friend who remembers every birthday and is the biggest proponent of commemorating every milestone, from getting a job to quitting a job, from leaving for a trip abroad to coming back from a trip abroad, from celebrating the end of a bad relationship to successfully flirting with the unattractive boy at work who is weirdly attractive sometimes. I’d like to believe I would celebrate a friend’s wedding just as enthusiastically as the bride and groom.

I found out that everybody is getting married through Facebook. It’s the season of love, and I can’t log on without finding a new person – like the boy I dated for one-and-a-half weeks in the fifth grade – sharing the good news. The celebratory post is subtle, yet distinct in the sea of food pictures; a mere upgrade of a relationship status to "engaged" or the standard ring shot. My favorite posts, however, are the videos secretly filming the proposal. I'll watch those over and over again, even if they’re of strangers.

Like most hopeless romantics with an affinity for elaborate partying, I don’t know what I want for lunch tomorrow but I know what I want in a proposal. It's something I've considered over the years of watching and hearing about people's perfect and unique special moments. Whether staging a lip-dub proposal, serving your significant other an epic prank proposal, or spontaneously taking a kneel at dinner, not one execution seems more beautiful than the others. Maybe that’s the cheeseball in me.

My 22-year old cousin recently got engaged and her only preference was that her family be there. Her boyfriend worked with her parents to plan for both sides of her family and his family to be at their annual Christmas party. It was this past Christmas that I, with a tummy full of homemade grape leaves and pita chips, watched my younger cousin promise to spend the rest of her life with "the young boy who put ketchup on his peanut butter sandwiches" in her first grade class.

The moment was lovely and I was grateful that they shared it with the family and me. Although, my happiness for her was slightly spoiled after her engagement led to an aroused interest in my romantic life by my extended family. “When are you going to get married and give your father a break?” one uncle sighed, concerned for me. “I don’t know,” I told him. “But I’ll be sure to post pictures and a video when it happens.”

In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite proposals (and no, I don’t know the couple):

Bridget Jones 2 movie clips: http://j.mp/15w4Jkr BUY THE MOVIE: http://amzn.to/tFSKZT Don't miss the HOTTEST NEW TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u2y6pr CLIP DESCRIPTION: Bridget (Renée Zellweger) momentarily spoils the mood when Mark (Colin Firth) proposes to her.

Yours,
Natalia Lehaf
Editor for Things Created By People

photography, poetry

Saying Goodbye Chelsea

Tennessee Nunez · September 13, 2015

Chelsea Window #1

August 2014

Windows focus our view onto an image, perhaps different when our line of vision is changed, but a single image nonetheless. Does perspective matter if you’re only being presented with the same glass guarded picture again and again? Yes. Looking down 23rd street here, I focus on a memory. What I see in her is very direct, and almost toy-like. I can tinker with this view. I can focus on the black car, and be sad; focus on the red awning and be mad; or focus on the nothingness surrounding what’s focused. I choose to ignore what is apparent. I take this picture while in a comfortable relationship for 3 years from the 21st floor of the apartment building I live in.

Chelsea Window #2

June 2015

Windows constrict our views - sometimes onto a grey image where there is no escaping that bleak outlook. It’s hard to see anything but what is right in front of you, and looking away to the black outreaches only seems more hopeless. I’m focused but also trapped. I’m depressed in my apartment on the 21st floor, and Chelsea looks ugly--vicious even. The only option is to remain in this box and hope my perspective changes soon. This window is less of a lens, and more of a cage. I take this picture as a depressed and single 21-year-old, a month away from what would have been 4 years in a relationship.

Chelsea Window #3

June 2015

Windows magnify our views on the everyday world around us. Chelsea takes me by surprise this afternoon. The monotonous blue skies and humid weight of the skyline are greeted by a purple sunset that caresses the tops of buildings. For the first time in weeks, the window on the 21st floor seems like it’s inviting me to see a bigger picture. There’s freedom and hope in this skyline. She had tricked me earlier—life isn’t the dark box it seemed to be before. There is a reason to look up, and no reason to look down. I take this picture a couple weeks after the last, healing slowly.

Chelsea Window #4

January 2015

Windows don't matter at all. Our view is strictly what we want to see, no glass can distort or control that. If I want to see something, then that’s where I’ll look. Windows are clear for a reason - so we, as humans, can see whatever we want, at all times. The 21st floor allows me to see everything in The City—in her—but I choose to simplify that view. What matters is the emotion; the shapes I have lost and the colors I have gained. Maybe the window is trying to protect me from what’s on the other side, but I need to feel that visceral pain to grow. And I have felt it. I took this picture at the peak of my relationship, but now looking back, it foreshadowed something both ominous and beautiful that was going to occur. The biggest loss and gain in my life to date.

Chelsea Window 0

G-O-D-E-S-S

You were the best.
G-O-D-E-S-S
I needed your sex.

Focused and lost,
I was in pain
Whenever
You were out of
Frame.

Like a sunset,
The beauty
Only hides the ugly.

You’re so ugly.

Tennessee Nunez is a 21 year old rapper and photographer based in NYC, currently studying at Hunter College. Find him on Instagram and Soundcloud.

audio

Swimming with Blonde Maze: a Dive into Oceans EP

Natalia Lehaf · September 13, 2015

This past May, Amanda Steckler, under the moniker of Blonde Maze, released her debut EP, Oceans. Oceans is a collection of indie-electronic assembled beats – a departure from the alternative rock music Steckler first remembers enjoying as a kid. Even though she started making music when she was thirteen, it wasn’t until 2013, at the age of twenty-one, that Steckler decided to seriously pursue music. Her decision came after she attended a show that made her cry from euphoria – “music tears,” she calls them.

Though she was a member of a rock band as a teenager, Steckler creates the music of Blonde Maze on her own, with melodies primarily from a mix of MIDI instruments, such as bells and tuned percussions. Steckler doesn’t record vocals until first creating the right instrumental sound. With a firm belief that success isn’t about the end result, but the work put towards getting there, the two years it took her to give life to Oceans was well worth it. Steckler transformed her feelings of longing for people seemingly out of reach into melodies whenever inspired. Her motto throughout the process was “a song isn’t finished when it is perfect; it’s finished when it’s done.”

As opposed to releasing music under her name, Steckler reasoned that her music – and the unmistakable vibe it carried – deserved a name in itself. And with a trademark head of blonde hair that playfully falls upon her face in a messy “maze,” her signature was born. Steckler’s brand of music is refreshingly heartfelt. Each song is oxymoronic by nature – intense, yet gentle; romantic, yet heartbreaking; distant, yet relatable. The songs speak a harmonious universal language. The music is so rhythmic that the poetry in her lyrics can easily escape the listeners. But please listen closely. Hear the words she penned of a romance across oceans while she journeyed between New York and London, and get ready to swim, drown, and then float along.

Blonde Maze is the solo project of indie-electronic musician Amanda Steckler based in New York. After spending two years traveling between New York & London documenting her travels via synths, bells, and vocals, she compiled four of her most personal tracks to form her debut release, Oceans EP. Oceans EP was released May 11th and represents the love, pain, excitement, and longing that comes with being an ocean away from someone or something dear to you. Each track portrays a different phase in this transatlantic journey. The Oceans EP, while overall indie-electronic, explores many sub-genres within this umbrella. http://blondemaze.com http://twitter.com/blondemaze http://facebook.com/blondemaze http://instagram.com/anamanda info@blondemaze.com

audio, interview

Under her influences: Meghan Irving talks about her inspiration

Meghan Irving · September 13, 2015

After years of honing her voice in talent shows and in cover songs uploaded to YouTube, Meghan Irving is ready to make music her life. On her recently released EP Under The Influence, Irving sings "I don't want to wait no more." While it's addressed to a lover, one can easily imagine her singing to the Gods of music, telling them that she is here and she is ready to sing.

Meghan Irving's Debut EP written and performed by Meghan Irving and produced by Ez-Rah.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

What artists or albums influenced your sound and songwriting?

I have so many different artists and styles of music that I love, but some of my biggest influences would have to be Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Whitney Houston, and Sia. Sia in particular is a big inspiration when it comes to songwriting. She writes catchy songs but they still have meaning and are relatable, which is something that I try to do. My writing is very personal, but I also love clever writing, and lines that make you go "Ooh that's good" or "that's a clever line.” The type of lyrics people get tattooed or put on a poster, or the type that just make you go “Yes! I've been through that, I know what she's talking about." I put a lot of thought into what I want to say in each song.

Vocally, Whitney and Christina are just incomparable and are two singers I've always been inspired by. Both of them are versatile and have very diverse audiences and their songs can be heard through various musical outlets. I never want to be pigeonholed into a particular genre, and that idea has definitely influenced my sound. I like all types of music so I try to create music for all types of people that can be played in various places.

Overall, the ability to convey emotion through my writing and my voice and make people feel and relate to something, and at the same time have songs that are memorable is the ultimate goal.

You wrote your first song at age 11. Who and what inspired your early songwriting?

I remember the first song I ever wrote was called "Fly.” It was quite a while ago but I vaguely remember it being about following your dreams and trying your hardest. It wasn't really that good, but it's the thought that counts, right?!

In the beginning I was mostly inspired by movies. I would watch different films and write songs to go along with what happened in the movie. My friends and everything that was happening in our lives at the time also inspired me. I would also just make things up sometimes and create stories about things that I found interesting.

The lyrics came pretty naturally for me. Creating melodies was the hard part. When I was younger and just started to write songs I would use other songs I knew as a template and write my own lyrics. I knew that in reality it didn't work that way, so fast-forward to my teenage years, when I finally began developing my own melodies.

From your first song up until now, can you pinpoint a moment that changed the way you write songs?

When I went away to college, my songs really changed. That's when I was truly out on my own and just gained a lot of life experience and went through some crap. You know how they say pain usually inspires the best art? It's weird how true that is! I also met a lot of new people during that time who introduced me to new artists and new songs. Listening to new music is always good influence. I'm not sure if that necessarily changed how I write songs; I'm still inspired by my life and what's going on around me. But it definitely changed the quality of my songs. They're much more raw, more relatable. I think I kept it a bit more surface-level before and wrote about how I thought I'd feel in certain situations. Now that I've experienced more, I can write from the heart.

You can read more about Meghan on her website and you can follow her on Twitter.

essay

7 Crucial Lessons from Unsolved Mysteries

Rachel Petzinger · September 13, 2015

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.

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

photography

Coast to Coast

Stephanie DeSousa · September 13, 2015

This collection of photos was taken over a time period of three weeks, during a vacation in Portugal. Although they span the southern tip and northern shores of the country, they all include meaningful substance to me. From the town my mother was born in, to my absolute favorite place to visit as a child, I can look at these photos and instantly return to a memory created there. I think that is my favorite thing about photography; the ability to capture and share the perfect scenes life brings me to.

Photographs are memories. They are sights. They are smells. They are sounds. They are my time capsules for things I don’t want to forget. With my camera around my neck, I have developed a new way of looking at the world. I have fallen in love with light and the details that most people overlook. I have learned there is beauty everywhere; you just have to find it – a concept that can, and should, be applied to every facet of life.

Stephanie DeSousa is a current graduate student pursuing her Doctorate of Physical Therapy. She believes everyone should find three hobbies they love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative. Photography lets her be creative. You can see more of her work on her website.