When I was little, my mom would take me to the beach while we had summer vacation (she was a teacher, and we lived on Long Island). I remember her telling me to run into the ocean so the salt water would heal the bug bites that I had scratched open, and I didn’t want to, because it would make them burn and sting. It’s something that’s become metaphoric now that I’m older. A few days ago, I called my mom, and as she was telling me about the part of our house that’s being rebuilt after Sandy destroyed it, for some reason, I just remembered that a little salt in your wounds heals them.
A little (metaphorical) push is usually what has made me move when I didn’t otherwise feel compelled to. Regardless of what great things it yielded, it was still a push, and I hated it at the time. The thing about people is that we don’t change unless not changing becomes the less comfortable option. It’s unfortunate, but we’re creatures of habit and we’ll hold onto our convictions until we’re literally forced to stop. In retrospect, I would not change much of anything about my experiences over the past few years. I just wish I knew that the salt in my wounds was healing them. I just couldn’t see how pain could be growth, healing and reckoning.
Something that I tell myself often when I’m all knotted up inside is that what I’m feeling I will eventually regard as the pain that comes with my soul stretching to be more and understand more and love more… growing pains. Don’t run away from the things that will fix you and heal you. They’re often unlikely, unexpected and uncomfortable. That doesn’t make them bad. It just makes them new. And if you’ve been around the block enough, you’ll know that they always lead to the bigger, better and more beautiful.
“Look at how much territory the French owned,” you tip the computer toward me, a Wikipedia map taking up half the screen and the other half a study sheet with what looks like 9-point font.
“Oh wow,” I say, squinting, resting my head on your shoulder, “are they the blue?” I never was good at history but you love it so much and you always get quiet when you talk about it, you take it so seriously and I feel like I don’t know nearly enough to have a conversation about it. You chuckle, respond with a head nod and an eye roll. “Didn’t they do the Louisiana Purchase and stuff?” I ask, racking my brain for something smart to say. You shrug, my head moving with your shoulders but I don’t move.
It’s love in the time of finals, and we are killing each other. We are still freshmen in college, fucking up all of our relationships and it’s a miracle our friendship has stayed this strong. But we’ve reached this point. You still call me bro, and I’ll always call you dude, but how do I tell you I love you? Can’t you tell that while we’re studying together all I’m thinking about is resting my ear against your chest? I am dying to hear your heartbeat; I am dying to hear your secrets that you can’t say out loud. Instead I settle for talking about the French even though I know nothing about them. I settle for you resting your hand on my knee for less than a second to tell me to stop procrastinating.
It’s love in the time of finals and we have waited all year for this. We drank away the winter together, and in the spring we drifted apart. Never too much, but just enough to make us realize what we had been missing. Your phone calls when I to be up at 4am the next day were tragic, I wanted to be with you so badly but I didn’t realize I wanted to be with you in that way until a week ago. Reading days started and you said you missed me to my face. And looking you in the eyes I told you I missed you more. You’ve started texting me good night. I wait for those texts some of these nights when I’m up endlessly writing papers and reading. So much reading.
It’s love in the time of finals and the worst part is that it ends in less than 12 hours. You go back to Ohio, and me to Brooklyn, and we try so damn hard to stay in touch this summer. But I’ll be in Vermont for so long, no phone service or computer. If I ask, will you write me letters? Or will you just nod your head and roll your eyes because I don’t know shit about the Louisiana Purchase and you don’t know how to write a letter to me to save your life. We’ll see I guess. I realized I loved you during finals week of my freshman year, and now I wait out the deadend feeling that summer brings.
Everyone who has ever been to Japan hates the ubiquitous Squatty Potty. Japanese people try to explain or excuse it with specious claims of “but it’s more hygienic than a western toilet because no part of your body touches it!” Maybe, but it is also impossible to aim as you crouch like a frog over a tiny basin in the floor, which is why people wind up missing the squatty potty altogether and pissing everywhere, which is the reason why Japanese train station bathrooms STINK of fetid urine. I gave it a go once, in the spirit of international relations, but from then on I staunchly refused to squat. I can eat raw eggs, I can bow to invisible people on the telephone, I can do “Japanese” things, but I draw the line at wading through someone else’s pee-pee.
Gaijin Girl Bridge Troll Syndrome.
‘Gaijin’ means foreigner, and bridge troll is what many western women turn into the minute they land in Japan. The gaijin boys with anime idealizations are off chasing the Japanese girls, leaving the gaijin girls to try their luck with the Japanese boys — who are often bemused/intimidated/flat-out terrified by gaijin girls, with their bootylicious gaijin curves and their feminism and their un-ladylike behaviour and their inherent inability to provide an aesthetically pleasing packed ‘o-bento’ lunch like mom makes, complete with mini hotdogs shaped like octopi (push black sesame seeds in for eyes!). Japanese boys also lack the thrusting confidence of gaijin guys, leaving gaijin girls to resort to laying it on thick like mayonnaise on a Japanese pizza if they want to get a date. When I first got to Japan, I had a major-scale crush on this one Japanese guy, who told me flat-out- he didn’t see me “as a woman.” Bridge troll level: over 9000.
So-called “Charisma” Men.
To briefly explain, Charisma Men are ‘Nice Guys’ who come to Japan from western countries, usually after a painful adolescence spent never getting the girl. They are usually drawn to Japan by the allure of anime. Upon touching down in Japan, something magical happens and they ‘henshin’ (transform) into the hottest guys around, attracting really cute Japanese girls with zero effort. See, a very small subset of Japanese women, ones afflicted with “white blindness”, (it’s a thing) sometimes have trouble telling when a guy is a creep because they are too distracted by his exotic foreign-ness. When a Charisma Man encounters a western woman, (who represents every bitch who chose the good-looking, confident dude over him back in the homeland), he temporarily loses his powers and reverts back into his true ‘Nice-Guy’ form. The only recourse for Charisma Man is to pretend the western woman is invisible or else treat her like the foul bridge troll she is, lest she reveal his true appearance. I have met a good many Charisma Men in Japan, and they all made my skin crawl.
Demented drivers and bicyclists
Japanese people ride their bicycles everywhere, and do so exclusively on the pavement (or ‘sidewalk’ to you ‘Murcans). Also, because they are so Japanese, most of them are too polite to ring their bell to let you know they are behind you, and instead opt to zip past you silently on all sides. You basically have to walk a perfect straight line at all times in Japan because if you veer off at any moment you will almost definitely get mashed by a Japanese lady on a mamabike with three kids strapped to it. Japanese people also have TV screens in their car dashboards, so they can enjoy their favourite TV show WHILE DRIVING. This is the kind of stuff nobody believes at home. In fact, nobody will ever believe you about anything at home — Japan is just too damn crazy.
Cavalier cruelty to animals and disrespect for animal rights.
See yakuza-backed pet stores replete with designer kitties, puppies, monkeys, toucans and meerkats, city parks stuffed to bursting with heart-wrenching colonies of abandoned, half-feral kittycats missing eyes, paws, or bits of tail, and the art of eating seafood while it’s not quite dead yet and can still feel pain.
The stares.
I don’t mind the curious gaze of adorable little peachy-cheeked kids, or the kindly, interested glances of wrinkly Japanese grannies. I’m talking about the sullen schoolgirl trying to kill you with her eyes. The old fart salarymen who glare at you with brazen contempt. The manicured, plucked and Louis Vuitton-bedecked young woman whose mouth drops open with utter disgust when she claps eyes on your unwashed foreign self. If you simply must STARE at the foreigner, please to rearrange your face first so it doesn’t look like quite so much like someone is trying to force feed you poop. Because that is never a good look.
The fact that any smartphone you buy in Japan makes a huge, conspicuous SNAP noise whenever you take a picture.
No, you can’t just disable it. See, Japan is so rife with perversity that every single phone or picture-taking device sold in Japan has to be programmed to make that snap sound, BY LAW, to prevent perverts taking pictures up schoolgirls’ skirts. Because of this, my Instagramming was severely compromised. It was embarrassing trying to take pictures with my Japanese iPhone. It felt like everyone in a 3 mile radius kept turning around to try to figure out what was making a noise every time I wanted to snap something COMPLETELY INNOCENT OMG. It’s already weird that I have a bizarre, stereotypically Asian habit of photographing my food — the SNAP just draws extra attention to it.
The fact that, having lived in Japan, you can never go home again.
You will never be the same. For the rest of your life, you will sweat miso soup and cry warm sake. Well, not really. But, yeah, kinda. Japan has a singular ability to GET to you like no other country you will ever visit. You’ll be dreaming of cherry blossoms, all-you-can-drink karaoke, and naked communal bathing for the rest of your days. Of course, you could always go back…
A few days ago I rolled through the architecture school on my campus because I got invited to watch the big end of the year student crit. Basically all the students showcased and defended their semester projects in front of the whole school. It was really fun to hear everyone talk about their projects, but once I got there I didn’t realize how much dude candy there would be. I don’t know if you know this or not, but young architects are HOT as SHIT!!! So if you are looking for a place to score some hot people, look no further than your local architecture schools. Find one. Take a day trip to one if you need to. It’ll be worth it — TRUST ME.
When I was in course work I avoided the library like the plague. I never did any school work there. It was always so freaking cold and depressing, a totally unsocial environment. But then the architecture and art history kids got a new building and a new library, so I would go over there to do my school stuff all the time. I would sit there for hours and hours, “reading” my books and looking up between paragraphs to cruise all the hot architecture dudes. Yes, there were that many! There is no better way to study.
Some professions have hotter people than others. I’d say the absolute hottest professions are basically everybody who works in design, firefighters/police people, construction workers, artists, architects, DJs or other musicians. If you play in a band you are already 10 times hotter to me than somebody who is, like, an accountant. Sorry not sorry! Once I saw a guy playing a piano and singing some dumb song, but he was going in on it and I managed to tune the singing out. I watched him play that keyboard and I watched the muscles in his neck contort as he worked to get the song out and I was SO attracted to him in that exact moment. He wasn’t even like amazingly attractive, but he was playing the piano and pouring his soul out into this song and I wanted him on that basis alone.
I think I’m just drawn to creative people who express themselves and who put things out into the world that don’t already exist. People say there’s nothing sexier than intelligence, and that’s true. But I take it a step further: there’s nothing sexier than a man who has ideas and who brings them out into the world.
Creativity is so sexy.
Is that why male architects are voted the sexiest people? Is it because they understand style and image, that they know they are selling a brand and that they are their brand kind of?
Every dude I have ever interacted with from the architecture school on my campus was a hot piece with amazing style, almost like having awesome style and being totally cool were the prereqs for getting in, much more important than “grades.” T and his cool, effortless style. D — this Mexican guy who had this fantastic rock and roll punk style and came to class on a MOTORCYCLE and always set the helmet on his desk (omg!). And then there was that one super hot hipster guy with the scruffy face yet strong cheek bones, cool clothes and messy hair who I always saw and was totally #obsessed with.
Being sexy isn’t about having a strong look, great clothes or being the perfect size. It’s about having something to say, visually. Maybe that’s what hot architects understand. They know that sexiness is about owning yourself and showing an unshakable confidence and sense of creativity.
Have you ever looked around and felt kind of disappointed of how human culture seems now a days? You know, like so judgmental, unforgiving of love, so close-minded? So this new penguins arrived recently in town at the zoo and it got me thinking about how absolutely adorable they are. Among the many creatures in the animal kingdom, penguins are my most favorites of all. But why is that, I pondered, and realized that they have a more advanced mentality than we do.
That is, of course, we assume they have an actual mentality.
First of all, they are monogamous. They are among the few of all the animals that choose a single mate for life. Now, I am not going to be hypocrite and say I have only been with a single person all my life. Having occasional flings here and there are a thrill very few deny enjoying. What I think is valuable about penguin monogamy is that once they choose the person they will spawn children with, they stick with it no matter how cold the freaking artic is. This is a valuable thing us humans should learn. With divorce rates skyrocketing and relationships loosing their value more and more these days, sticking with a single being for all your life seems like a huge accomplishment. Kudos to penguins for being able to pull it off.
Yeah, don’t feel bad; most people can’t last that long in a relationship either.
Okay, secondly, penguins accept homosexuality. Seriously, is homosexuality still an issue? I mean, I really can’t understand how such a large chunk of society still deems same sex relationships as immoral. Come on people, as if other people’s choices of love affected you in the least. Penguins don’t pull this crap on fellow homosexual penguins.
On a related note to the above-mentioned, penguins also accept adoptions. If there is a children-less pair, they will adopt the heck out of any stranded chick. Or even a rock sometimes, just anything to give them the care they were born to give. They don’t have to undergo legal procedures that last years and years, or have to bear with them other penguins giving them the stern stare. It just happens they way nature was meant it to.
I know, legal procedures are only meant to protect the kids and whatnot. However they sure go over the top ridiculous at times…
I do not mean to be all feminist and shit but another plus on penguins is: the woman goes and gets the food, the man stays watching over the kids. In homosexual couples they probably have to solve it differently, but you get the idea. I don’t know where you are but where I come from it is still looked down upon if the dad, while the mom works, raises the children. Yeah I know, totally ridiculous. Penguins seem to have that one figured out.
And last, and most importantly, all penguins wear suits wherever they go. How classy and elegant is that? I don’t think society is nowhere near that soon.
Have you ever looked around and felt kind of disappointed of how human culture seems now a days? You know, like so judgmental, unforgiving of love, so close-minded? So this new penguins arrived recently in town at the zoo and it got me thinking about how absolutely adorable they are. Among the many creatures in the animal kingdom, penguins are my most favorites of all. But why is that, I pondered, and realized that they have a more advanced mentality than we do.
That is, of course, we assume they have an actual mentality.
First of all, they are monogamous. They are among the few of all the animals that choose a single mate for life. Now, I am not going to be hypocrite and say I have only been with a single person all my life. Having occasional flings here and there are a thrill very few deny enjoying. What I think is valuable about penguin monogamy is that once they choose the person they will spawn children with, they stick with it no matter how cold the freaking artic is. This is a valuable thing us humans should learn. With divorce rates skyrocketing and relationships loosing their value more and more these days, sticking with a single being for all your life seems like a huge accomplishment. Kudos to penguins for being able to pull it off.
Yeah, don’t feel bad; most people can’t last that long in a relationship either.
Okay, secondly, penguins accept homosexuality. Seriously, is homosexuality still an issue? I mean, I really can’t understand how such a large chunk of society still deems same sex relationships as immoral. Come on people, as if other people’s choices of love affected you in the least. Penguins don’t pull this crap on fellow homosexual penguins.
On a related note to the above-mentioned, penguins also accept adoptions. If there is a children-less pair, they will adopt the heck out of any stranded chick. Or even a rock sometimes, just anything to give them the care they were born to give. They don’t have to undergo legal procedures that last years and years, or have to bear with them other penguins giving them the stern stare. It just happens they way nature was meant it to.
I know, legal procedures are only meant to protect the kids and whatnot. However they sure go over the top ridiculous at times…
I do not mean to be all feminist and shit but another plus on penguins is: the woman goes and gets the food, the man stays watching over the kids. In homosexual couples they probably have to solve it differently, but you get the idea. I don’t know where you are but where I come from it is still looked down upon if the dad, while the mom works, raises the children. Yeah I know, totally ridiculous. Penguins seem to have that one figured out.
And last, and most importantly, all penguins wear suits wherever they go. How classy and elegant is that? I don’t think society is nowhere near that soon.
Have you ever looked around and felt kind of disappointed of how human culture seems now a days? You know, like so judgmental, unforgiving of love, so close-minded? So this new penguins arrived recently in town at the zoo and it got me thinking about how absolutely adorable they are. Among the many creatures in the animal kingdom, penguins are my most favorites of all. But why is that, I pondered, and realized that they have a more advanced mentality than we do.
That is, of course, we assume they have an actual mentality.
First of all, they are monogamous. They are among the few of all the animals that choose a single mate for life. Now, I am not going to be hypocrite and say I have only been with a single person all my life. Having occasional flings here and there are a thrill very few deny enjoying. What I think is valuable about penguin monogamy is that once they choose the person they will spawn children with, they stick with it no matter how cold the freaking artic is. This is a valuable thing us humans should learn. With divorce rates skyrocketing and relationships loosing their value more and more these days, sticking with a single being for all your life seems like a huge accomplishment. Kudos to penguins for being able to pull it off.
Yeah, don’t feel bad; most people can’t last that long in a relationship either.
Okay, secondly, penguins accept homosexuality. Seriously, is homosexuality still an issue? I mean, I really can’t understand how such a large chunk of society still deems same sex relationships as immoral. Come on people, as if other people’s choices of love affected you in the least. Penguins don’t pull this crap on fellow homosexual penguins.
On a related note to the above-mentioned, penguins also accept adoptions. If there is a children-less pair, they will adopt the heck out of any stranded chick. Or even a rock sometimes, just anything to give them the care they were born to give. They don’t have to undergo legal procedures that last years and years, or have to bear with them other penguins giving them the stern stare. It just happens they way nature was meant it to.
I know, legal procedures are only meant to protect the kids and whatnot. However they sure go over the top ridiculous at times…
I do not mean to be all feminist and shit but another plus on penguins is: the woman goes and gets the food, the man stays watching over the kids. In homosexual couples they probably have to solve it differently, but you get the idea. I don’t know where you are but where I come from it is still looked down upon if the dad, while the mom works, raises the children. Yeah I know, totally ridiculous. Penguins seem to have that one figured out.
And last, and most importantly, all penguins wear suits wherever they go. How classy and elegant is that? I don’t think society is nowhere near that soon.
