“There are a million wolves hiding in the environmental substrate I’ve called speargrass. The reality is that they’re not even wolves. When they get home in the evening, they take off the wolfskin and look just like us.”
I had been single on the Princeton campus for about a month when my friends sat me down for a serious talk about “moving on.” I had been moping around for too long, they explained, and it was time to start dating, seeing other people, hooking up, or whatever I wanted to call it.
En detail I rather love and admire the female species; it is only en masse that it begins to confuse, frighten, and bewilder me. My opinion on the subject was, however, somewhat flexible until this weekend when, in the course of forty-eight hours, I both visited an all-women’s college and watched a play, “Uncommon Women,” about life at a women’s college.
“I am forever a part of this corner of the world—how could I not be, when it is the reason that I get those strange looks and questions to begin with?”
A month ago, before any of us took semiseriously the idea that Donald Trump might win the Republican primary race, coverage of Trump in the media presented an instructive paradox:
Late one night last weekend, waiting in the checkout line at Frist, an individual approached me to say that he was of the notion that I was the author of the anonymous “Ask A Girl” column that had recently debuted in the pages of the Nassau Weekly. It’s a strange feeling, being framed. Because no matter how utterly NOT the author of this article I am, the mere speculation draws from the ether an imaginary ghost-me, with ghost intentions, leaving splotches of invented ectoplasm on laptop keys I never pressed when never sitting smirkily in my dorm room, midnight hour, writing a column that the real me- flesh, bone and conviction- simply does not believe in.
