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(02/26/20 4:42am)
It has been roughly thirty years since my mother experienced a culture of sexual assault and harassment on Penn’s campus that radiated from fraternities. Penn’s rape culture hasn’t been addressed since then. I don’t have a friend who hasn’t been grabbed from behind at a party or cat–called by drunken frat brothers from the same organizations she avoided. Why has Penn failed to fix this systematic problem?
(02/12/20 2:13am)
I don’t like how time takes me farther away from you. It’s not the space, it’s the time, the number of days that pass since I’ve woken up beside you, making me feel like you’re moving farther and farther away. It's after midnight and I'm lying awake in a hotel room bed next to my sister and this is the only thing I can think. It didn’t matter when you left to go home to Chicago for the holidays and I stayed to wait for my family to pick me up. You weren’t far away when you left. You only got that way later.
(02/12/20 4:40am)
Lara Jean writes letters when she has a crush so intense she doesn’t know what to do. I did the same thing, but instead of letters, I wrote club applications. And senior spring, with Feb Club and Senior Week in the mix, I find myself not thinking of what lies ahead, but of those lost loves, merely vape in the wind. Maybe it’s sentiment, maybe it's my waning sense of self as I wait for a job offer. But, hey, we always what we can’t have, like perfect skin, the blind confidence of men in a group project, or an honest mental health conversation (oops, different op–ed). So this is my love letter to all the clubs I’ve loved before.
(02/12/20 3:46am)
It was a breezy Sunday morning, one set for the perfect brunch with lopsided pastries and a warm cup of coffee in hand. It was the kind of day when dog owners would wake up early to go running in the park. The birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and the world seemed at peace.
(02/12/20 3:24am)
I am 11, sitting on my father’s duvet, eating pieces of greasy popcorn, and watching American Idol with him. I’m anxious about the algebra test I have to take in a few days, convinced that I will fail even though I have been studying for hours. I redo problems in my head, repeating the associative, commutative, and distributive laws.
(02/12/20 2:15am)
I first held a hammer when I was three years old.
(02/12/20 3:32am)
My teachers taught me to read, but my mother taught me to read. Growing up, she urged me towards volumes of books that connected me to a world outside my quiet suburban life—Kafka, Borges, Tolstoy, Vonnegut. It was one of emotion, intelligence, and drama, a world of ideas that moved me just as they had moved my mother 30 years before.
(02/19/20 3:10am)
As I begin not only a new decade—but also chapter of my life—I want to reflect on the past ten years that have shaped the person I am today. These past ten years have been the darkest, happiest, and toughest of my life thus far. However good or bad, everything that I’ve been through has been trials in God’s plan to make me strive to become a better person.
(02/05/20 3:05am)
On a normal Friday afternoon last semester, Michel walked into the Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) waiting room, got a paper cone of cold water, and sat down near a door labeled the Community Room. There, a sheet of printer paper read: "RETURNING STUDENTS GROUP." Minutes later, her roommate Katey emerged from the room; while she was talking to the other students and therapists exiting, her eyes were scanning the space until they found Michel.
(01/29/20 3:24am)
Wading through through the throng of bourgeois hipsters at Hot Yoga Santa Monica, I couldn’t help but think it was exactly the sort of place my mother would hate. I placed my Converse on a shelf next to someone’s Louis Vuitton bag, and nervously tugged at my hand–me–down tank top, still stained with waffle cone batter from my job at an ice cream shop. The studio was hot, and I placed my mat, branded RENTAL all the way across, in the only remaining spot: between an ostentatious gong and an elderly man who was, I kid you not, ripped. He smiled at me in solidarity, for though I didn’t know it at the time, we had both elected to torture ourselves in that room. What I did know for sure was this: 1) I was the only woman in the room wearing a shirt—without an irrationally small hip to waist ratio—and 2) I felt like absolute shit.
(01/22/20 2:45am)
The Florida sun was sweltering, and the atmosphere of anticipation was thick and contagious. I had just marched from the barracks—the dorms of Florida State University—alongside my team to join the hundreds of other boys outside on the battlefield. What was the battlefield in question? A grassy field. What was our weapon of choice? Dodgeballs.
(12/04/19 4:57am)
I was around 12 years old when I was talking with my mother about what I had learned in Hebrew school that week. I was already on a path of total disillusionment with Judaism and religion as I knew it, as she repeatedly joked that the issue with religion is that every other faith tries to tell you all the answers, while the Jews are the only ones asking all the questions. She said it often leads to more confusion with Jewish identity than clarity.
(11/20/19 3:51am)
This is not an essay about climate change. It's an essay about futile existentialism—and a little bit about climate change.
(11/20/19 3:56am)
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
(11/19/19 5:48am)
I guess I'd call it environmental guilt—a feeling of being completely useless and also completely responsible for more than I want to accept. It’s the fear of extinction. It’s the discomfort of having my survival instincts kick in, and being confused as to why some people seem so unafraid of the danger. It’s the anger I feel when someone asks me why I protest. It’s the disappointment of forgetting my metal straw, or worse yet, the disappointment of knowing my metal straws won’t save me. It’s hopelessness and helplessness. I feel so guilty.
(11/13/19 5:36am)
August 28, 2018: Sitting on the concrete bleachers overlooking Sheerr Pool in Pottruck, I was more nervous than I wanted to admit to myself. I was a freshman surrounded by about 40 other strangers, many of whom were pulling swim caps and goggles out of their bags and chatting with friends they hadn’t seen all summer. I introduced myself to the people around me, whose quiet demeanors suggested that they were freshmen, too. As always when I meet new people, I was more focused on making sure the words coming out of my mouth were coherent than on actually learning names. I remembered maybe one person, but I figured it was a problem for later. Practice got underway, and all the newbies and I were split into two groups: the swimming group and the “dryland” group. I headed down onto the pool deck and over to lane four, unaware that I just made one of the best decisions of college. And yes, I am referring to both the fact that I joined Penn Club Swim and that I decided on lane four (to my fellow lane four swimmers: I am forever loyal).
(11/06/19 3:53am)
It was Oct. 9, the Wednesday that kicked off fall break. I felt a sudden pang in my head. My head felt cloudy during my first two classes of the day, but I didn’t think anything of it until later. A searing headache was then paired with a clogged nose. I needed to relax. There was no doubt that I was getting sick, but I was just happy it was happening during fall break.
(10/30/19 3:24am)
As the cliché goes, I was a little girl who loved weddings. I dreamed of the poofy cupcake–like dress, the cake, and the flowers, among other things. One thing that continually frustrated me when I was little, though, was the fact that my parents never had any wedding photos. I would push and push, asking where they were, who took them, why we didn’t have them at our house. All my mom could muster up was, “they’re at my parent's house,” or, “next time your aunt comes to visit, she’ll bring them.” Multiple aunts and uncles visited, and each time I wondered and pressed as to where the photo album was, until my mom snapped and told me not to ask about it. Only several years later would I be told why the photo album didn’t exist.
(10/23/19 4:31am)
**Content warning: The following text describes sexual assault and can be disturbing and/or triggering for some readers. Please find resources listed at the bottom of the article.**
(10/16/19 3:24am)
I’m having one of the best semesters of my life being abroad in London, but my time here has made me realize something: I should probably be seeing a psychologist again. No, nothing happened; there was no “incident” or panic attack. I think I just need to take an inventory of my mental space.