Ego of the Week: KK Brooks
Name: Karekin "KK" Brooks
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Name: Karekin "KK" Brooks
I pulled my sweater tight around my body, shaking from a breeze equal parts cold and invigorating. Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” blasted through the speakers as clusters of middle school boys laughed with measured amounts of glee, daring each other to walk through the hallowed halls of Philadelphia’s most famous prison without so much as a gasp.
I got no sleep the night before moving into college. Instead, I spent those seven hours silently sobbing into the white comforter of a twin–sized bed, timing my breaths so my mother wouldn’t stir from the other room of the Airbnb.
When the majority of the Class of 2020 first set foot on campus as students, High Rise Field was still green. Allegro Pizza and Huntsman Hall stayed open 24 hours a day (I even spent 24 hours in Huntsman for a Street article, once upon a time).
Joel Olujide (W '23) started his time at Penn a little differently from the rest—by activating Hill’s fire alarm on the first day of school.
Name: Julia Coquard
In one of the first classes that history professor Ann Farnsworth–Alvear taught at Penn, the sheer range of experiences of the students packed into her lecture on Latin America was both remarkable and invisible, depending on who you asked.
Every time I walk into the 34th Street office—so pretty much every day—I’m greeted with paper. The wall behind my desk is tiled with covers of old issues dating back to 2017. To my left are photos of former Street editors—one DFMO–ing, one as a child in a fedora. A note from my predecessor Nick Joyner is tacked right in front of me. An ad from "Professor Salaam" touting a "sexual powder" and protection from "mystical abuse" hovers directly in my eye–line on the back wall. A note saying “Good Job!”—I don’t remember who wrote it—sticks to the corkboard to my right. These are the ephemera that mark my time on 34th Street.
If you’ve met me during any part of my adolescence, you probably know me as ‘aa–kroot–ee’. If you’ve had the unfortunate displeasure of meeting me for the first time at any social event where the decibel of the music turns those three syllables into an incoherent mess, you may know me as "AJ."
Tori Borlase (C '22), laughs and says “give me a second,” when I ask about her activities on and off campus. She needs more than a second to list off her numerous involvements.
Name: Jordan Williams
Our Fall 2019 Dining Guide features personal essays, epistolary articles, restaurant reviews from neighborhoods all around Philadelphia, and a healthy amount of love. We went to Pizzeria Beddia, wrote about eating alone, and trekked down South Street. So, enjoy. We hope you're hungry!
Person who doesn't know how to talk to twins: "Half the time I can tell twins apart."
During freshman year, my friends and I would often sit on the cold floor of a cramped dorm, scarf down some Domino’s cheese pizza, and talk endlessly about our identities. I always possessed a somewhat textbook definition of what my identity was. It wasn’t until recently that I finally learned to accept all of its messy details and blurry lines.
“It feels as though you are carving completely new ground,” I remark to Professor Maggie Blackhawk, a Federal Indian Law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a member of the Fond du la Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. She responds with a quick burst of friendly laughter before responding, “I have been told that by others before.”
Listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell! on Repeat: “SABS? Sit and Be Sad? I do that.”
I was thinking a lot about mental health this week. For the last few weeks, we’ve been editing and shaping a feature on antidepressant use—more specifically, what happens when you go off an antidepressant. What happens to your body? How do you feel? What makes antidepressants so important for so many people, and, for some, so desperately hard to stop taking?
One of the last things I expected to do in my first week of senior year was share a meal of vegan chicken with my freshman year ex–hookup. And yet, there we were. Maybe I said yes to his DM'ed dinner invitation because I wanted to tell myself I had fully moved on and genuinely cared about how he was doing. Or, maybe (definitely) my self–righteous ass was just bored and wanted to give him shit for working at Google and hoped to get a free meal out of it too (I didn’t). This passive–aggressive curiosity begs the question: is staying friends with an ex mature or masochistic?
Name: Stephanie Wu
Biology Professor with a Hallucinogenic Side: "Academics don’t know anything about wild secondary plant compounds. Shamans do, though.”
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