On Jellyfish and the Fear of Touch
Early in the trip, the jellyfishes begin to take on the quality of metaphor.
Early in the trip, the jellyfishes begin to take on the quality of metaphor.
To choose an omamori is to cast a wish.
Like most women and AFAB people, I’ve been trained from birth to mistrust my perceptions. Then I spent the night in a haunted house.
I felt sick with despair that I wasn’t out in the physical world, so I built a digital identity with the things I had to hand.
The King William’s College Quiz is notoriously cryptic and uncompromising. For twenty-five years, my friend and I tried to get the perfect score.
I wonder what roles I would have felt obligated to fill as an adult if Midge, the pregnant Barbie, were instead an astronaut, a divorcée, a bad friend.
Soon after I bought the game, I began to obsess over another map, one that also didn’t fully exist.
We knew ‘Zolar’s Encyclopedia & Dictionary of Dreams’ was absurd. But, as teenagers, we were thrilled by the idea of interpreting the secret symbols of the universe.
Everything present is made of the past—the cities we inhabit and the language we use and the clothes we wear and what they make us feel.
For my father, the slingshot seems to offer a moment of creative flight, a brief escape. It isn’t the solution, but it keeps everything balanced.
Natural, natural, everything natural. I’m a sucker for it, Shinto-ish environmentalist and object-worshipper that I am.
Both the sandwich and I were ‘made in China’ but with an undeniable Americanness.
Everything I do is done behind a desk. And now, now? Now I can even use this Peloton. I don’t even need to run in the rain.
At detention centers, these prized possessions go straight into the trash. A devastating omen for the way immigrants are treated in this country.
There are horse girls and there are Internet horse girls.
To me, these never felt like steps to sprint through on the way to simulating life, but life itself.
As cliché as it’s become to say, I found myself needing this game in a way I could have never accounted for, even with all my years of fanboying.
I am no gentile, but a Jew, with chill Jewish parents, who loves the pepper-and-onion slice at Alfie’s.
It’s very calming, very methodical, very good if, say, someone you love has died, but you know the world cannot stop, and you can’t either.
There’s an irritating coyness to the language around wedding expenses: they’re not expenses at all, they’re “investments.”