Gymtopia
Students are immersed in yellow-orange light, treadmills and Precor machines hum, and light rock plays quietly in the background. There is constant movement. An older man, probably a professor emeritus, shifts from one weight machine to another. A girl with a blond ponytail starts a plank, holding it until she starts to shake from exertion. […]
Rappers’ Delight
At one point during their set at Terrace F. Club this past Saturday, Das Racist announced that they would not playing “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” the song many in the audience had come specifically to hear. “It’s a dumb song. You guys are too smart for that shit,” said co-frontman Himanshu Suri, known […]
Teresa’s Pizzas
I rolled out of bed and into the shower to erase the stench of State Night that still lived on my skin and in my hair and in my blue jeans, which I had forgotten to take off before lying down to sleep the night before. In the shower I opened my mouth to the […]
Acting Asperger’s
Imagine you are at a party on another planet. You have a guidebook about alien behaviors. (It is far less comprehensive than the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) The first alien you meet is female. You introduce yourself, as the guidebook suggests. Her skin turns a pinkish tinge. She looks away, then looks back. She […]
Imagery and Anxiety
Casually, if cautiously, a throng of men encircles the scarred metal of an American fighter jet, the US F-15. A few, more daring men climb the torched cockpit, and children observe with rapt interest. This first American lapse in the ongoing Libyan crisis saw a malfunctioning jet crashed and mangled in a field of sheep, […]
Racists in the Library
If you were to do a Google search for “Asians Sleeping in the Library,” you would come across a blog that features, well, pictures of Asian students across the globe asleep in libraries, meant to pay homage to their hard work and diligence. If you were, however, to accidentally leave out the very important “sleeping” […]
Brown Eyed Man
If you have never heard Van Morrison’s yearning, keening voice—its blues and jazzy swag , the way it stretches words into birds that fly you to heaven, its worn beauty—well, then, you’ve never heard it. But I bet you have; Van the Man, as he is often dubbed (and for good reason), sings at most […]