Ripple Float & Wellness Center keeps the tone light, though. They’ve got beanbags and watercolor paintings and potted aloe vera. In the lounge, there’s a bookshelf with titles like Gracefully You, Global Bohemian, and The Art of Happiness (by the Dalai Lama). The tea is ginger-spiced and gut-healthy, the candles are scented, the couch cushions are macramé.

The man at the front desk, Bryan, hands me a laminated sheet to pick the color lights for my tank. I ask if anyone ever actually chooses red lights, my eyes widening at one photo where the water glows like it’s on fire. “We get a lot of veteran floaters that ask for them, actually,” he says with a laugh. “Red causes less dilation on the eyes.” I try to imagine floating in red water and can already hear the Jaws theme—I go for a calm aquamarine instead.

Eli picks aquamarine, too. He’d asked to tag along about a week ago. He didn’t know much about floating either (he was imagining a fifteen minute affair with clothes on, for starters), but he was hoping it might put his life into perspective, removing himself from it all for a while. “I want to see what the nothing can tell me about the something,” he quipped.

Me, I’m much more interested in the nothing than the something. The real world, all its messy particulars and contingencies, it’s okay. It’s just so specific. I’ve never been good with details, Mondays and Tuesdays and so on. I first heard about sensory deprivation tanks in my philosophy class last semester. We were talking about Descartes—are we minds beyond matter? Simple, indivisible, pure? Do it, doubt the world, doubt your body, all the sharp angles, the rough patches, strip it all away. What’s left? I figured the questions were hypothetical until our professor told us about the tanks—he said he floated in one about once a month, in a spa by the Omni Hotel. 

I went down a Googling rabbit hole that night, head full of demons and dreamers, selves without senses, pure essences and lofty abstractions. Turns out, more and more people have been seeking out sensory deprivation tanks over the past decade, to help them sleep better, to stress less, to chill all the way out. Some of them come out rhapsodizing about cosmic oneness and nigh-on nirvana. Praise piles on praise: it’s rejuvenating, it’s psychedelic, it’s ‘meditation on steroids,’ a shortcut to the deepest levels of mindfulness anyone can reach, monks aside. It’s also great for your skin. What can I say: I was a fish eyeing a hook. I bit.

Once Eli and I make our light and music selections, Bryan leads the way to the corridor with the float tanks. I take my coat off as we squeeze into one of the rooms, hot and humid. There’s a little space to undress, a shower, and a white plastic door in the wall leading to the flotation tank. Bryan runs through the pre- and post-float instructions, gives us a smile, a thumbs up, and lets us get on with it.

I say the tank door looks like a spaceship, and Eli laughs, though it wasn’t very funny. He says he’s nervous, and we both laugh, though that wasn’t very funny either. He crosses the corridor to his own room and starts closing the door. “See you on the other side.” 

After shutting my own door, I take off my clothes, put on earplugs (salt in your ears, very crunchy, not fun), and shower as Bryan instructed. And then I open my tank. It’s more of a room, really, tall enough to stand in: the water glows a soft aquamarine, and the rainforest track I chose turns on, greeting me with faraway bird calls, creaking frogs.

I step inside. The water is slow to move through, thick with salt. I lower myself, slowly, slowly, careful with my eyes, fearing the decidedly unrelaxing burn of hundreds of pounds of Epsom salt. Then, I close the door behind me. I shut off the aquamarine lights, mute the music, silence the frogs. And I let myself float.

I’m breathing too quickly. I can hear myself sucking the air through my nose, feel the whoosh of it through my chest. I try to calm down. I tell myself it’s all fine and normal, being naked in a strange tank in the dark and hearing your heartbeat in your ears and tasting salt in the thick air. I focus on my breath. The in and the out. With each exhale, my muscles slowly start to loosen, and I let myself sink deeper and deeper. My neck softens, my head falls back, and, soon enough, my body has completely let go. When the saltwater hovers just an inch below my eyes, I discover that I can’t bring myself to worry about it.

I’ve settled in now. All that’s left is to lie still, stare into the darkness, and wait. I’m ready to forget my body, to cast off my senses and enter some Cartesian consciousness. Only, the longer I float, the more sensations I start noticing. I feel my lower ribs jutting out from the surface of the water. I feel the water from the shower tickling the hairs on my face, above my mouth, hardening my skin as it dries. I blink—I can feel my eyelids. Am I supposed to stop feeling my eyelids? How do I stop feeling my eyelids??

After a while, I admit it to myself. It’s just not going to happen. I had been holding out hope for an out-of-body experience, but ultimately I can feel everything I would’ve expected from floating around in some salty water in the dark for ninety minutes. Wet, warm, and a little silly.

Still, I keep on floating. I wonder how much time it’s been. I listen to my breathing, watch purplish blobs appear against the black. And I’m right—I never forget my body. But then I hear an echo from something outside, and I realize with a start that, for a moment, I had forgotten that there was an outside. I just hadn’t been thinking about it. My thoughts are all darkness and water and salt. I didn’t catch when, but at some point life beyond the tank had slipped away from me—right now, my whole world is just this little tank. I have nobody waiting for me, nothing to do, nowhere to go.

I start fighting to keep my eyes open, but then I can’t give myself a reason why. It doesn’t matter whether I fall asleep or not in here—any worries about wasting the experience, or not having anything to write about, are too faint, too far away, for my mind to get a grip on. I try to care. I can’t quite pull it off. Instead, I listen to my breath and my heartbeat, and I just exist there, in the darkness and the nothing, not thinking about much of anything but that breath, that beat. And then I fall asleep. 

A few hours ago, I woke up on a couch in my friends’ suite. We had stayed up until 2 AM the night before and I didn’t want to walk back in the cold. The day came to me slowly, the golden light, the heater humming, the bad breath, a ghost of yesterday’s pizza. One friend was already awake, and another woke up soon after, and they both decided it was a great idea to try and all fit on the couch at once. I felt someone’s elbows poking into my stomach as they piled on top of me, and there were ows and oys, and my laughter squeezed against someone else’s ribcage, and my leg went numb, and my arm got stuck between the cushions, but none of us had any intention of leaving. We lay there, talking about nothing, until the others woke up and we went to brunch. I could’ve stayed like that for longer, so warm and weighed down.

When I wake up in the darkness again, I’m wet and alone. I feel strange, a quieter thing, hollower, almost. I know I’m just in the tank, but, after waking up inside it, thinking about the world before I started floating feels like recalling a dream. The memories are vague, hazy. So I just keep floating, like I did before, like it feels like I’ve always been doing. I don’t even have to try to clear my mind—it’s been emptied out. Nothing is urgent enough to concentrate on. Thoughts drift by; I let them go.

Suddenly, a woman’s voice cuts through the silence, telling me that my float is over and if I could please step outside so the self-cleaning process can begin. Her voice is low, harsh. I hate her. I squint when the blue lights turn on. When I recover, the first thing I see are my legs, and they surprise me—I had forgotten my body would look like anything. I draw them tight to my chest and stay there, curled up in the warm water, not wanting to leave my cocoon, not even wanting to think about it. After a few minutes more, the water starts churning like a jacuzzi—this tank is going to self-clean, with or without me. I force myself to stand up and push open the door to the bright-white room. 

The air I thought was clammy before is now far too cold. I drag myself out of the tank, step into the shower, compel myself to turn it on. The water hits me harshly, stripping off what’s left of the thick salt solution I had been swaddled in. I remember I still have my earplugs, and pull them out—all of a sudden, sound becomes as sharp as sight, too high, too grainy. I want to put them back in. I hear Bryan talking to Eli outside. “Oh, I know that face—that’s the oh, shit face!” Eli laughs out loud, light and easy. I have no idea how he can do that—the thought of trying to talk to anyone right now exhausts me. I pat myself dry and put clothes over slightly damp skin, socks on slightly damp feet. It all feels very wrong and scratchy. Trying to ignore the water from my hair seeping into my sweater, I force myself out the door.

Eli is standing over the kettle in the lounge. He had a great time. He had been spinning around, bobbing here and there, positioning his arms every which way—at his sides, behind his head, starfished. At some point, he even started trying on different accents—he realized that he could be anyone, not just in the tank, but outside of it, too. “I was thinking about the narrative of my life,” he said. “How I could change it.” I say that’s so exciting. I hope I sound excited. He asks me how my float went, but all I’m thinking about is my cold hair, my itchy sweater, the warm quiet I want to crawl back to. How did my float go? I’m still floating. Well Eli, I didn’t feel human, and honestly I don’t feel quite human right now.

But I don’t say that. I fiddle with my mug. “Really weird.”

We steal some organic tea bags and go outside. As we’re walking back to campus, Eli says he’s remembering how happy it made him in the tank to think about going back to his life. “I was thinking, like, this is great, and I’ll be here for ninety minutes and enjoy it, but I’m excited to go back into the world.” He had thought a lot about his friends—he had felt like hugging everyone as soon as he saw them. 

I hadn’t really thought about my friends in the tank. Definitely not about hugging them. I think about them as he says it, though. And the more we walk, whatever strange, vacant creature I was in the tank begins to fall away. I savor the strength of my legs, pushing down against the pavement. My arms cutting through the air. The moon comes out from behind an apartment complex, a motorcycle roars by, a little girl tugs her mother into Ben & Jerry’s, giggling. A hug sounds nice, I tell him. Really nice. Eli says something funny, and I tip my head back to laugh.

The post Floater appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Would it get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is.

It could get the railroad for these workers. And it could be were it is.

It could Franky it could be Franky it could be very fresh and clean.

It could be a balloon

The chorus and two solo voices chant over slow, shifting chords played by an electric organ. The libretto seems indecipherable until I realize that it is not meant to be deciphered. One voice reads numbers. The other recites confusing, repetitive, impossible poetry. The chorus sings solfege.

This continues for five minutes. It’s confusing and intriguing, and most of all boring — a seductive sort of boredom. I continue listening. 

I am listening to Einstein because of Susan Sontag. Her essays is the reason I love art. In Against Interpretation she imagined a new way of thinking about art. An “erotics,” rather than a “hermeneutics” of art, she called it. To strip the experience of art from its obsession with interpretation and ultimately with “content”  was the erotics of art. Art, Sontag thought, should aim to provide an experience that evades interpretation. To aim for art as she imagined it to be during the earliest creation of art: “incantatory,” “magical.”

A great deal of art produced in the sixty years since Sontag published her essay has attempted to shed itself of the notion of “content,” that is, the meaning of a piece as separate from its form.  Visual artists followed this road of abstraction into oblivion, shifting from directly representative art to less concrete representation, not expressing any experience of emotion or consciousness but rather intending to evoke a specific, transgressive experience in viewing the art. Music soon followed suit: minimalism, as it was aptly named, distilled and abstracted the composition and performance of music until “content” was lost and only a turbulent sea of notes and rhythms remained.

That is the artistic world Einstein finds itself in. The piece is an ultimate abstraction of the musical experience. 

Philip Glass’s opera — if one can even call a piece with no plot or character, aria or recitative an opera — is five hours long, performed without intermission. I remember this fact as I contemplate rising from my couch thirty minutes in to use the restroom. 

I remain seated.

It’s separated into scenes and “knee plays” — connectors, like the human knee. The scenes are simple and, like the music, repetitive: Field. Train. Trial. Night Train. Trial. Prison. Spaceship.

For twenty minutes, I listen to the same motif. Two musical lines that repeat and interchange, slowly modulating and altering themselves. Their change is subtle and impermanent—phrases return just as soon as they change. Dancers race across the stage in frenetic, repeated patterns. Watching this scene has me simultaneously bored and terrified. The music feels strangely ominous, but I struggle to identify what the music itself is. 

All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends.

It could get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is.

It could get the railroad for these workers. And it could get for it is were.

It could be a balloon. It could be Franky. It could be very fresh and clean.

It could be those ways.

The musical and physical landscape only becomes more turbulent. The chorus continues to repeat, growing louder, their voices straining against the score as the dancers grow frenzied and a sole voice continues to chant his impenetrable libretto over it all. Until, when you least expect it, everything stops. 

The lights go out. The stage is silent for a split second.

From the chaos a sole saxophone plays and it is transcendent.

While listening to Philip Glass I think about the ocean. The music is like unrelenting waves, crashing on my ears. I picture the tide coming in and out as the music swells and sinks.

Maybe that’s why when I listen to Philip Glass I think of my mother. My mother is in love with the ocean. She swims from the minute it is warm enough to bear to the minute it is too cold to stand. I’m not sure why. I’ve always figured she enjoys the exercise, but have started suspect there is more to it than that. 

When I was a child, she used to drag me to the beach. I did not like the ocean. It was cold and dirty and not fun. 

Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the ocean, too. I have learned to appreciate the simple ritual of our visits. Now, over the long summer months, I swim out until it feels as though I am on the horizon and I float. I feel the gentle rocking of the waves and little else. I stare up at the sky or my eyelids and think nothing. In the winter, I stand on the sand, shivering, and stare at the waves. I like to focus on the smaller ones, those small bumps on the surface. They’re in constant motion, homogeneous and random.

Will it get some wind for the sailboat and it could get for it is it.

It could get the railroad for these workers and it could get for it is.

All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends.

Put these days of 8 8 8 cents into 100 coins of change.

In the minutes that drip away, I find transcendence.

Nearly an hour into Einstein on the Beach, I consider giving up. What once was novel and exciting has grown boring. I feel like I am unable to stand any more synthesizer and saxophone. But I continue. I’m not sure why. Obligation, maybe. To the ocean, or to my mother.

I am struck by the cave paintings from Lascaux, France because their animals flow like waves. The rich, earthy streaks of color give the impression of animals up close but look like one mass of beauty from afar. The walls suggest a pre-civilizational world so abundant with livestock that the cattle could be mistaken for an ocean. The walls evoke both mystery and boredom, much like the glacial chord changes of Einstein.

The act of creating these paintings was itself ritual. They were likely created to pray for an abundance in the hunt. The spiritual labor of creating the art was as vital to the physical labor of slaying beasts. Einstein is, in some ways, also a ritual. The opera will never be performed again: it is so intricate and physically demanding that, once its original director decides to not direct it again, it will be lost. To endure Einstein is to labor in the service of art. To seek, like a fresh kill, sustenance.

Now hours into the opera, I feel like I am being violently shaken. The tempo oscillates between extremes. The soundscape finds neither balance nor resolution. With each shake I wonder when Glass will latch onto the next motif and move on. 

But then I remember the ocean. I let the waves rock me.

Mark Rothko painted to make people cry. His works are dense masses of shape and color — pinnacles of abstraction. They intend to express, as he put it, “tragedy, ecstasy, doom.” 

I wanted to know for myself whether his method worked. I sought out a Rothko at the Museum of Modern Art and waited to cry. I didn’t. But it fascinated me: I felt as though I could keep looking and continue finding new layers of shape and color. It was almost moving before my eyes, but never changing. 

I felt that I understood what Rothko intended. I entered a trance, staring up at these massive canvases, trying to make sense of the minutiae of color and shape. I experienced the erotics of art.

There was ecstasy in Rothko’s painting — and agony, too. But mostly there was boredom.

It was an ocean.

This love could be some one

Into love

It could be some one that has been somewhere like them

It could be somewhere like like liiiiike them

I’m listening to Einstein on the Beach because I was told it, too, would put me into a trance. I chase these artistic experiences, like I did with Rothko. I relish the light-headed feeling I get walking out of a museum where I did nothing but stand and stare. Like stepping out of water, emerging from entrancing artistic experiences allow me to re-experience the sensual world as novel and exciting.

And, a few hours into Einstein, it works. I am completely enraptured by the sound. It is repetitive, yes, but it is divine. It’s unlike anything I had experienced before. The ardor of pure boredom forges an entirely new aesthetic and sensory experience.

Philip Glass composed Einstein on the Beach to bore. He was a minimalist: composing beyond content in the service of a new experience of art. In the opera about him, Albert Einstein appears only once, as a violinist He composed an ocean of music: so massive that each bit of movement and turbulence is gone in an instant, replaced by another, nearly the very same. The experience of listening to Einstein is analogous to the psychological experience of watching the ocean. It is boring, but in its repetition it becomes entrancing. 

Rothko and Glass are perhaps some of the few artists who truly achieved the paradigm Sontag laid out in Against Interpretation. They created an art that was meant to be experienced, not interpreted. An art that was erotic and visceral and in some ways magical. Like the handprints and flowing bison on the cave at Lascaux, this art points to an experience free of the structures we create to explain “art.”As hand paintings of bulls and horses bring us as close as art may to the earth, Einstein on the Beach brings us to the edge of the shore of the blank blue ocean.

After five long hours, I rise from my couch. I think about my mother again, and in my mind I am staring at the waves.

The post ESSAY: While listening to Philip Glass I think about the ocean appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Usually the astro lounge isn’t so carnival-like, much to the relief of anyone doing their physics homework there. It’s more like the “restaurant at the end of the universe” in the Douglas Adams sci-fi book of the same name: a beautiful little refuge from chaos, floating on a tiny rock in space. The lounge is partially wood-paneled, carpeted, lined with couches and reddish wooden tables, and always stocked with coffee pods and tea bags. You could fit all 32 registered astronomy undergraduates into the lounge, with room to spare for a couple of graduate students discussing galaxy morphology.

52 Hillhouse was originally built in 1848 as a private home for Yale agricultural chemistry professor John Pitkin Norton. I wonder what Norton would think about the Darth-Vader-themed Mr. Potato Head that guards the top of the coffee machine, or the horror movie posters on the walls, edited to feature names and photos of Yale astronomy professors (“FRANKENBOSCH: AND HIS TERRIBLE MONSTER, THE BASILISK”).

The astro lounge feels cozily warm in my mind, so it’s funny that the room is perpetually fifty degrees. Even in my second year as a regular visitor to the lounge, I still haven’t figured out the thermostat, so I just make it work with my winter coat and instant hot chocolate.

Each day, I get to be in the astro lounge between my morning astronomy classes and lunch. My signature spot is at the tables near the window (the downside is this is the coldest part of the lounge). If I need something more forgiving than those wooden chairs, I’ll sit in the armchairs near the (non-functional but very pretty) fireplace. Or if I’ve really had a day, and I need to drink some tea and relax, I’ll sit/slouch/sleep on the couch near the array of astronomy and physics magazines that line the coffee table.

The astro lounge is where you go for insider info on all things astronomy, like whose classes to avoid, what research groups to get into, or which scholarships to apply for (the current advice is to apply to the NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium, featured on a large colorful poster in the lounge). The astro lounge is where my friend Annie told me about the Maria Mitchell Observatory’s research program, where I spent this past summer creating a whole new method to find recoiling AGNs, which are supermassive black holes that have been launched out of the centers of their galaxies. If Annie hadn’t told me about Maria Mitchell, I wouldn’t be writing my first research paper right now.

I don’t know everyone who walks into the astro lounge—there’s often a postdoc or grad student I haven’t met popping in to grab a coffee before heading back upstairs to their office—but no one feels like a stranger. I think it’s because we all study astronomy. We share a sense of wonder at the beauty of the universe, and we know we’re lucky to wake up every day and explore a tiny new corner of it. When we look at M87*, a black hole bigger than our entire solar system, we recognize how delicate Earth is.

Perhaps that’s why the department is so kind—we see the beauty of space and the uniqueness of humanity. But I’m not claiming that being a Yale astronomy major is perfect—we still argue and spread gossip and share intense dislikes. Last year, an older student in the department was complaining about an advanced astronomy course with me and some other younger students. As soon as we started agreeing with him, the professor of that class walked right into the lounge.

I’ve also neglected to mention that I’m not actually an astronomy major—I’m doing the B.S. version of astronomy, the astrophysics major, which means I’m still part of the astronomy department but I have to spend much more time in physics classes than I want to. If you catch me in tears somewhere on campus, it’s probably because of electricity and magnetism, or the concept of infinite dimensions, or because ohhh God there’s so much I don’t understand, what do I do?

I never need to explain these things to the other people in the astro lounge—they already understand. Complaining there is cathartic, and sometimes Sally or Jay will be around to help me with my problems.

Jay is the senior who knows how nearly everything works, from complicated fluid dynamics to the minds of other astronomers. None of his advice has steered me wrong so far. Sally is an ever-present fixture in the astro lounge, and will likely haunt 52 Hillhouse forever. “After I graduate in May,” she says, “you’ll have to tell the freshmen, ‘you can’t sit there, that’s where Sally’s spirit lives!’” She’s even in the astro lounge on weekends, when I’ll sometimes drop by to study and then stay to hear about her latest research troubles. When we’re having a difficult time we tend to end up there, because if all else breaks, there’s always the astro lounge. Someone there will make you feel better.

There is one perfect picture of me from the 2021 astro lounge holiday party: I’m smiling at the camera, giant inflatable reindeer antlers sitting proudly on my head, and there’s an inflatable ring (tossed by Sally, off-camera) frozen perfectly in mid-air, right about to fall onto my antlers. If you could step inside the photo and look around, you’d see thirty other grads and undergrads smiling in ugly sweaters.

We had another holiday party in the astro lounge this year—the final time our wood-paneled room will house any space-themed Christmas sweaters. After this academic year, the astronomy department will move to the newly renovated Kline Tower, a dull brown building that looks like tall stacks of dirty pennies. I’ve heard that there will be a new astro common space in Kline, but it can’t compare to our astro lounge. Soon there will be entire graduating classes that have never experienced the community of 52 Hillhouse, and our peaceful floating rock will be destroyed by the end of the universe.

The post CULTURE: The Astro Lounge at the End of the Universe appeared first on Yale Daily News.

MRS. FOX: I don’t care about the truth about yourself. 

— Wes Anderson, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009

Candy-colored creatures hang on horizontal racks. Teardrop-shaped torsos bobble in a clammy indoor-outdoor breeze. Nothing Boutique is tucked in the southeast end of the Oxford Covered Market, beside various cafés and market stalls. I used to walk past this place to peruse the stuffed animals on my way to choir, twice a week during the 2020-21 school year. In the grand scheme of the pandemic, that’s often. Rituals of frequency were few.

This time, Jonty, my partner, slouches beside me. I spend half an hour agonizing over the right choice. Which stuffed animal represents Jonty best? Which will erase the suffering of this year abroad? I’m shopping for something to hold, to hurt, when it’s time to go long-distance. He says he doesn’t see the point. So I make him wait while I pay twenty pounds at the till. 

Jonty Fox isn’t much larger than a Nalgene water bottle. His scythe-shaped arms are stitched to his neck. He has a black felted nose and black glass eyes. He’s yam-colored, with white fluff around his jaw, inside his ears, and at the tip of his tail. He’s soft, but slept-on and salted with a year’s worth of tears. 

Jonty [Man] is six-foot-five, spectacled, and shaggy-haired. He’s been wearing the same graphic tees since he was twelve years old. At home, he grows chili peppers on his windowsill and brews beer in his closet. At university, he’s a chemist and a rower. He has a goofy smile and a wide, loud voice. Right now, he lives on the other end of Whatsapp video call. The blue glow of his phone display lances off his glasses, obscuring his black-brown eyes. When I met him in November 2020, he was in the process of dropping out of Oxford.

***

Foxes have long been a thing in my life. I grew up in Fox Point, Wisconsin, watched Fantastic Mr. Fox compulsively, and sketched on fox-themed stationary. I’ve never seen a fox in Fox Point. 

At home, there were lots of toys. I remember my mother sneakily weaning my sisters off their pacifiers, leaving a chain of dolls and blankets in her wake. My younger sisters still have those. They call them “bumpies” (translation: pudding-stained rags). Transitional objects offer security to a child during periods of change. 

I had a tendency to enact violence on toys. I would unlatch my crib and crawl backwards down the stairs. In the playroom, I used craft scissors to cut hair to the scalp, pop out eyeballs, create dermal lesions. I harmed them because they were gifts I didn’t want. I harmed them because they didn’t live up to my expectations. I harmed them because I loved them so much. 

Jonty Fox is unmarred, a testament to growing up.

***

I’ve seen a fox in Oxford. 

After a two-week quarantine and triple-masked flight, I arrived on the evening of October 3rd, 2020. I didn’t have a SIM card yet. I was profoundly alone. At the Broad Street roundabout, rickety townhouses hunched over the cobblestones. Small pockets of freshers huddled around phone flashlights and vodka bottles on the steps of the library, determined to make friends in spite of pandemic bans. 

There, beneath the sickly moon, in the middle of the carless street, was a fox. It stared at me, then trotted between the bars of a wrought iron gate and vanished.

I was hollowly lonely in Oxford. My bed was a bench built out of the wall, too skinny to sleep two (by design, courtesy of grinchlike architect Arne Jacobson). When COVID spiked again, British students were sent home. Tinder dates felt, and were, illegal. My window looked out over a soccer pitch. No one ever played soccer there. In October, the sun ran its arc from east to west. In December, the arc had diminished to a rim that touched the tree tips at all times. 

January: six months from going home. The seams on Jonty F feel like the veins on Jonty M’s wrists. It started out as something unserious. Filling the endless gray slush of covid time. But, of course, I eventually became too serious. I went on every distanced walk with my pajamas in my backpack, hoping he’d invite me over for dinner. A flurry of miscommunications, sleepless nights, and vegan curries in a frozen flat he dubbed “the ice cave.” I moved in. 

February: five months from going home. Jonty F fits in the hollow space between my collarbone and my jaw. That’s where Jonty M’s head went when he coiled his lanky frame to sleep by my side on a twin XL mattress. That month, the sky was watery, blue on green on gray. We walked through meadows together, kicking mud and spitting about tutors. Hand-to-wrist and head-to-head: we walked that way, slept that way, barely working as far as I can remember. He had these endless email chains with tutors, itemizing the many reasons he needed to leave Oxford. His typing slowly dwindled. Then, it stopped. We came up with a slow, safe way of living, and he stuck around. 

***

March: four months from going home. Jonty M took me to Rutland to visit his family. 

Rutland calls itself  “the county of good taste.” Jonty grew up feral, searching for lost socks beneath bridges and pushing his sister down hills on a bike trailer. His family was kind, the food was great, and the hikes were sweet and new after treading and re-treading the Oxford ones. I was glad to be with Jonty, even gladder to be in a family again. The sky began to lighten. It suddenly felt warm..

Jonty’s mother, Jane, runs a league of elderly river swimmers. They dip in the River Nene twice a week, every week. The river wiggles through Rutland like a slug, not a snake. It doesn’t cut, it doesn’t race. It sits. It sinks. I heard rumors about kingfishers, turquoise birds that graze the river’s surface with rusty bellies, but never saw one. 

The pageantry of submersion: like geese, we waddled to the crumbly edge of the slab at the base of the bridge. It was frigid, thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit in-water. The elders, matching orange floaters dangling between their legs, plunged fearlessly onto slippery rocks. This was when the honking began. Three ladies of the party, the ones with close-cropped hair, derived a masochistic glee from the cold. Their cries were shrill and crisp, like the blue March sky.

The water was cold enough to blur vision and squeeze lungs. And it was fast, God, it was faster than I thought. I swam with all the strength my icy muscles could muster, and I was at a standstill. Jonty M waited for me. He was always out of reach, around the barge, beyond the pier. Eventually, I was numb, a blessing. I felt that I could stay in forever, even when he wanted to turn back. 

Apparently, the body’s temperature continues to drop after exposure to cold. I stayed in the water five minutes too long. I shook so hard, I couldn’t put my clothes back on. Jonty dressed me like a porcelain doll, all frozen. Then, suddenly, I stopped shaking. By the time I got into the car, I was hypothermic, feeling sleepy sleepy sleeeepy with my head in Jonty’s arms. Jane gave directives: rub her, cover her, keep her awake, don’t let her sleep, don’t let her sleep. He snapped in my ear and poured scalding coffee on my mouth.

And I knew, lying there, what to call Jonty. A lifesaver. In more ways than one. And perhaps we’ve formed a trauma bond, but we help each other survive. We use each other to this end. 

***

July: I’m going home. Flying away from him, all I can hear is the whine of a string about to snap. I’ve had problems with my ears since birth, prone to swimmer’s ear and airplane pressure aches. This is something different, something loud. Thankfully, I have Jonty Fox. I squeeze him like flesh, but that doesn’t help.

The fox sits in the passenger seat of my car when I drive to the coffee shop before sunrise. He waits in the perilous heat of July, windows cracked. He sits between my legs on my birthday when I am criss-cross applesauce on the floor on a voice call with Jonty M. He gets squished down the side of the bed.

There’s something good about a distance cry. The ferocity of the hurt can bring the person you miss back into the room. I remember his touch, and I can feel it. I remember his breath, and I can smell it. Jonty F becomes a portal, activated by pain. 

Over daily calls, Jonty M and I talk through many things we avoided when we were both in the room. Jobs, marriage, and politics. I tell him how I want Jonty F to have an act two as a plaything for our children. I want to bring him to the hospital and shove him into my infant’s soggy hands. I want to sew his arms back on when she rips them off, pull his eyes out of her mouth when she tries to swallow them, and when she inevitably loses him, I want to buy a new fox and pretend I never did.

I tried sniffing Jonty F for this essay, and that was a mistake. He doesn’t smell anything like I thought he would. I thought he would smell like insect repellant, or Lynx body spray, or English mold, or soil. But he smells like me.

***

Two months ago, Jonty M was visiting me in New Haven—two years (twelve fox years—for foxes, ages) into our courtship. I was starting courses. During my 8:00 a.m. European Epics seminar, I puked so violently that it spewed over the edge of my mask, a chunk landing on my open notebook. I spent two weeks trying to get an abortion. After meeting with a floating head in a telehealth window-box, I stuffed four cottony pills in the pouches of my cheeks to instigate contractions. We started watching The Fantastic Mr. Fox—still my favorite film. “I Get Around” by The Beach Boys ricocheted off the bathroom’s subway-tiled walls. Jonty F hid in the corner, buried under the guts of Jonty M’s disemboweled suitcase, waiting to become useful again. 

The post PERSONAL ESSAY: Twelve Fox Years appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Pork rinds are underwhelming. They’re underwhelming in the same way gay sex is underwhelming.

Think back to the first time you had a pork rind. Maybe you’re Colombian, and you can’t even remember because you were so young, and your abuela kept a never-ending supply of chicharrones in the snack drawer. You must have been sick of them by age five. Or maybe you bought a bag by accident at the supermarket, thinking it was some sort of organic tree-bark chip; got home; peered at the bag; and in a post-Pilates, stomach-grumbling moment of I’ve-been-vegan-for-two-weeks-now-and-I’m-still-depressed, you ate the pork rinds. I told you—underwhelming.

Pork rinds are especially underwhelming when you, like me, waited eight years of your life to have them.

I’m not lucky like Colombians or bad vegans. I’m Muslim. For most of us, pork is not a dinner staple or an innocent mistake in a grocery bag. It’s haram. And for some reason which I’ve never cared enough to learn, it’s a very bad haram. A statistic: there are more Muslims in my life ready to shoot up black tar heroin than nibble on a pork loin. Nibble! Not me, though. If pork is our Prophet’s dope, I’m a junkie.

My addiction started on a second-grade field trip. Since discovering the illicit meat existed, I hadn’t stopped dreaming of it. Clear of parental supervision, I finally had the opportunity to indulge my fantasy. I sat up as our bus pulled over for lunch. I prayed that there was pork at this rest stop. There just had to be.

Behind a stampede of hungry students, I swaggered to the vending machine, fingering the soft one-dollar bill in my pocket like a badass. Of course, the dollar was absolutely flaccid as I attempted to feed it to the machine. When I managed to get it in, I selected my forbidden fruit, labeled with cautionary bold letters: PORK RINDS. My heartrate quickened. The bag spiraled out of its row and dropped into the basin with a noiseless thud. I retrieved the pigskin and walked into the shade with my best friend Jacob, half-Jewish and the only trustworthy witness to my first transgression. Before I knew it, the bag was open, and I was crunching my way to hell. The pork rinds tasted like what packing peanuts probably taste like, if seasoned with Old Bay. They smelled worse.

Despite the anticlimax, I was hit with a rush of adrenaline. There, on the side of a Central Florida turnpike, I committed myself to a lifetime of chasing that heretical high. I was convinced that I loved and craved all things pork. It was advantageous, then, that my neighbors, the Galls, were pork connoisseurs. Getting my fix was as easy as telling my parents I was dining at Jeff’s. I dined at Jeff’s all the time. Ribs, loins, and bellies would crowd my plate beside a small portion of starch and an even smaller portion of salad. It was my WASP-y wet dream, an all-out pig orgy. Napkins stained with pork grease piled on my placemat, a record of my impiety. Though my house was just next door, I felt miles away from halal lamb and lentils.

***

Some Muslim boys can evade our Prophet. None, not even me, can evade our mothers. Thanks to Mrs. Gall, my loudmouthed pork plug, I was discovered and scolded for my sinful irreverence. But my dad, a drinker, and mom, a smoker and a drinker, couldn’t be too mad. After all, the only thing Muslims hate more than pork eaters are hypocrites. Friends and family couldn’t judge me for eating pork while they drank, smoked, cheated, and lied! I was armed with moral righteousness. Pork became a cause with personal stake. For what seemed like the first time, I had skin in the game of Islam.

Around the time I was outed as a pork eater, I decided to embrace a nickname that had been assigned to me by my friends. It was unrelated to my dietary habits but apt nonetheless: Hammy. Hammy is what you get when you give your Pakistani child a common Arabic name and send them to prep school in the South. It’s the pork-ification of a sacred word, an etymological nightmare for a Muslim family. My real name means strong lion. Hammy is mutant swine. Hammy is haram embodied. Hammy is the first step to dangerous assimilation: lacrosse games, house parties, B-grades, white girlfriends!

The worry was warranted. Hammy became my way into white spaces. I was pronounceable, which meant I could hang. If proof of my coolness was needed, I could always back it up by casually eating a bacon, egg, and cheese in front of a group of friends and await their nods of approval. Of course, they didn’t give a shit. But I did. An alter-ego emerged, one that shattered expectations of how many boundaries a Muslim kid could break. If Hammy could eat pork, he could be Western, modern, openly gay.

But as Hammy consumed more of my identity, transgression became a pattern that extended beyond the culinary. I became a pathological liar, social drug-user, and bone fide arrogant jerk. My slippery moral relativism could justify any behavior, however irresponsible, as long as another Muslim in another place was probably doing something worse. I felt emboldened in my personal jihad against hypocrisy. I was entitled to the world. Since when did pork taste like hubris? Was the Prophet right all along?

***

The first guy I had sex with had an underwhelming dick. I could barely feel it. It was the best sex of my life. As I laid next to him on my dorm room bed, not exactly panting, I realized something I should have at the rest stop, all those years ago, when I was stuffing my mouth with my first bag of rinds. I didn’t love pork. I loved freedom.

The post PERSONAL ESSAY: Hammy appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The day’s warmth was a reminder that the first week of August would soon pass, and with it, the summer. I glumly threw away the daffodils at the end of the week, remembering Herrick again. The withering of the daffodils also brought the start of the school year. Now, I think again of Herrick and summer’s daffodils. We have short time to stay, as you.

——

I’ll remind you again, since I have to keep reminding myself: the month is now October. At least, it is October as I’m writing this at a corner table in the Trumbull Library. The room is decorated in the usual collegiate gothic style. Deep burgundy furniture encloses dark-stained tables. Thick carpets cushion the wooden floor. An empty stone fireplace centers the bookshelves. The room, designed to protect against winter, instead gives the impression that it is waiting for winter. We are waiting along with it.

When I find myself thinking of the coming season, I turn not to Herrick’s poems but to the writings of Elena Garro. Garro is a Mexican writer credited with pioneering magical realism. Her most celebrated novel, Los recuerdos del porvenir, was published in 1963. It is translated to English sometimes as Recollections of Things to Come and other times as Memories of the Future. I prefer the former because of how clearly it presents the irony of Garro’s work. To recollect is to hold a memory or already-visited place with you in the present time. To recollect something that has not yet occurred, something that is to come, requires the opposite action, to entertain a factionalized future, crafted in the present.

For all of the casualness of the phrase, the ease it implies, The Recollections of Things to Come doesn’t capture the full temporal scope of Garro’s daydreams. They begin with force, the future blurring with the present so that it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. Trying fruitlessly to settle the narrator in place and time, Garro writes in the first pages of Los recuerdos del porvenir:

“Here I sit on what looks like a stone. Only my memory knows what it holds. I see it and I remember, and as water flows into water, so I, melancholically, come to find myself in its image, covered with dust, surrounded by grass, self-contained and condemned to memory and its variegated mirror. I see it, I see myself, and I am transfigured into a multitude of colors and times. I am and I was in many eyes. I am only memory and the memory that one has of me.”

Garro tries to begin the story in a matter-of-fact way, but she is unable to maintain such straightforwardness. In only the second sentence, the narrator becomes lost, confused as to where she sits, unsure if she is observing what is around her in the present or looking over a memory.

——

How curious, no? The progression of seasons, one constantly pushed by another so that it is impossible to set myself firmly in time. I confuse the waning of one thing for the beginning of another. The character of the seasons seems to dominate whatever uniformity might come from living in one place. New England cities with four distinct seasons make residents feel like constant travelers who are pulled from place to place with the change in weather.

It is by this change, the annual fall of leaves, that I’m brought to remember my time on campus last year.

Confession: I left Yale before the end of the 2021-22 school year, my freshman year, because I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what it would be like to go. The memory of how this plan originated is still clear to me. I spent my freshman year in one of many red-brick buildings along an expansive lawn nestled with oaks and statues called Old Campus. We have short time to stay, I thought, moving into Bingham in August, already fearing that my four years of college would go by in a blur. As Herrick kept watch over his daffodils, I looked over the Old Campus oaks, measuring the passage of the year through their changes. I believed myself to still be firmly within fall as I walked back to campus on a late-November afternoon, just as the Branford bells began their toll.

While returning through the same gate the next day, I felt peculiarly that I had been gone a long time, although I had left Old Campus only that morning.  It was at least seven degrees cooler than it had been all week. A steady wind, too, left the lawn much emptier than usual. Only the previous afternoon, an unusually bright and warm day, athletes had amused themselves playing catch. Nostalgics rested in grooves for an hour or so of meaningful poetry. These collegiate rituals, always picturesque, were set among the leaf-cushioned lawns. In only a day, the autumn leaves that had fallen on the ground had been raked and removed. The grass underneath and the trees were now starkly bare. I stood still for a moment, not yet fully through the gate, and realized with a jolt that fall was nearly over.

My uneasiness began then. The initial thought, not even true, stayed with me:  “I have been away for some time.” It kept me from my work, drew me outside for what would prove to be the first of many strolls. On these habitual walks, in the comfortable seclusion of evening, I could indulge in daydreaming.

I imagined leaving for Mexico City as the church bells tolled. During the change of seasons, there comes a gloom from the canopy of trees as they let through the day’s last blue light. Walking during the blue hour, I confused the temperate change of seasons—the sudden chill, the early darkness—with the dawning of evening in Mexico’s tropics. Soon, I even began to anticipate the rain. I imagined it falling as it did during the rainy months in Mexico City, from late afternoon to early evening.

Do you see what I’m trying to show you?

Those were the whimsical evening hours when I walked feeling a yearning akin to homesickness for a place I had only been once before. I looked to the future, thought of it incessantly in a form of daydreaming, and confused it for having bearing on the present.

In New England, it is impossible to escape the seasons. One is in constant anticipation of what is to come. When I imagined Mexico City, however, I saw it fixed, always, during the rainy summer months. In escaping to Mexico City, I hoped to escape the change of the seasons. In escaping the change of the seasons, I hoped to escape the passage of time.

Alas, each tropical summer month took on a character of its own. January and February, when I had yet to adapt to the new city, were demure. March, with the promise and deception of spring, is the month of irony. April marked, finally, the beginning of the rainy season.

I walked incessantly in Mexico City, enjoying most of all the time just after sunrise and sunset. When the rain came in April, however, I was pulled away at whatever hour to go outside. I felt the rainy hours like a bloodletting. They brought on a weakness of perspective, and I found it difficult, even unpleasant, to imagine the future during them. The rain often fell so thickly that it was impossible to see more than a few feet in front. The city air, usually heavy with smog, was briefly cleaned. What would come after the rainy hours seemed hardly relevant at the time. And yet, arriving back home drenched, I found it exasperating that I could not exercise the same presence during other parts of the day.

——

My exasperation, I may generously say, resembles the concerns that readers and publishers encounter when revisiting the legacy of writers like Elena Garro. The problem is trying to modify something that exists at one time to exist in the future. In the case of Garro we may ask: how do you faithfully reinterpret the work of a writer who worked firmly within the social confines of her time? Does Garro’s writing let her transcend from 20th century Mexico where she was not fully recognized for her writing?

Recent reprints have worked to establish Garro’s work as a classic. In the Spanish newspaper El País, David Marcial Pérez wrote: “It is assumed that the classics will never die, but more than once, they have been forgotten for long periods, stuck in crumbling catalogs or exhausted editions, without anyone to reprint them.” He cites Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir as one of the most significant reprintings taken on by publishers in the past year.

The novel was originally published in 1963 by the editorial imprint Joaquín Mortiz, which was known for publishing the works of exiled republicans. (Garro lived in exile for 23 years.) In 1985, the publishing rights were absorbed by Grupo Planeta, another publishing company. The most recent edition was published by Alfaguara, better known as Penguin Random House, which plans to extend the sale of the novel to Chile, Columbia, and Spain. The previous year, Random House had published Garro’s complete works. The move by these publishers is part of a larger literary trend to solidify Garro’s place as a pioneer of magical realism, a genre better known through the works of her male contemporary Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and her place as one of Mexico’s greatest writers.

The movement to give female writers their proper due is not new. Judith Thurman, who translated poems by the Mexican poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, writes about the effect on her own career as a translator: “The feminist Second Wave was cresting when I immersed myself in the life of Sor Juana. We of that generation were looking for heroines — exceptional women who history hadn’t paid their due.”

Are we, of this generation, still looking for our literary heroines, as Thurman was? If so, Garro would cut quite the figure. Stylish and captivating in her personal life, her biography is as interesting as her literature. She is, in the traditional way, a scorned woman. Infamous for dying in misery in the house where she lived with more than a dozen cats. Infamous for her turbulent relationship with her ex-husband. Infamous for the conspiracies she engaged in later in her life. And yet, never quite famous for her writing.

If we were to go back in time and try to make a heroine of this figure, what part of her story would we tell? Would we take her own words as fact or emend her writings to fit the feminist movement that came after her? When we try to make heroes of authors, we run the risk of moralizing their stories, unfairly editing the reality of their life. And yet, I’m still tempted to edit Garro’s biography to suit my conception of what it is to be one of the most prominent female writers.

I refuse especially to take Garro at her word when speaks about her ex-husband, the renowned literary and intellectual figure Octavio Paz. Garro says that she “lived against him, studied against him…wrote against him. […] In conclusion, everything, everything, everything that I am is against him … in life, you don’t have more than one enemy, and that is enough. My enemy is Paz.”

I don’t believe that Garro was being truthful when she said that her enemy, her only enemy, is Paz. It seems unlikely that she would allow herself to be dominated in such a significant way and still write successfully. I think that her enemy is time. Unlike Herrick’s poems that seem subtly feminine in the way they associate the passage of time with physical decay, Garro describes time as being primarily enriching. Often, she even seems overwhelmed by the layering of the present with the past and the future.

The question of legacy, especially of how to reinterpret a legacy, seems well suited to Garro, an author who seemed constantly stuck in between times. We return to her words. “Here we sit on this stone,” we may say, trying to place ourselves within time. If we are pressed to say more, to describe our own reality, the temptation to go back to the past resurfaces. The phrase is then modified. We pause. We attempt to answer the question again, and we reach our hand down to the rocky surface and find that its substance is not so straightforward to describe. “Here we sit on this stone,” we may try to repeat, and again, we struggle to continue.

——

I sit in the Trumbull Library, looking out to the courtyard where fall begins to slip away from the single colorful tree that still stands. I hold Garro’s book. She is pictured on the cover somewhere in her youth, with a timid smile. Like Garro, I try to situate myself in time by beginning: “Here I sit in what looks like fall.” Pressed to continue, I hesitate. “Here I sit in what looks like fall but only my memory knows what it holds. I see what’s outside and I remember the coming of winter, as season flows into season. Melancholically, I come to find myself in its image, transfigured in a multitude of times.” The daffodils bloomed in their vase by the window, withered, and were thrown out. As summer went, so will the fall, then the winter and the spring.

This article is part of the November issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine. Read the rest of the issue here.

The post A Response to Daffodils in Mexico City appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Consider our setting: gothic stone buildings, wood-paneled libraries, vaulted ceilings, and stained glass windows. Our picturesque campus communicates that Yale is a palace for learning and research for the upper echelon. Tourists and prospective students flock here in large groups, audibly “oohing” and “aahing” at the architectural wonders of our carefully designed landscape. Though the buildings are a major spectacle, the students are also a part of the show. This fall, when Sterling Memorial Library was reopened to the public for the first time since the start of the pandemic, little signs popped up urging tourists: PLEASE DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH STUDENTS OR STAFF. Spectators wander through our dormitories, our classrooms, our study spots, and our social spaces. We go about our business like rare animals in a zoo.

Scene: During the peak of my acute midterm stress (a tough moment for my personal hygiene) I ventured into the courtyard to get breakfast. To my dismay, a tour group was there learning about how “Each residential college is a microcosm of the Yale community.” With the door clanging loudly behind me, they turned to look at me. Like any good zoo animal, I tried to go about my normal routine and act like I wasn’t phased by their observing eyes. I felt a twinge of embarrassment and insecurity as I felt them perceive me: do I embody what they expect a Yale student to look like? Were my slightly greasy hair, deep under-eye circles and ensemble of mismatched sweats part of the Yale life that they expected to see? To campus visitors, we aren’t just random college students, we’re Yale students, which comes with a host of assumptions and expectations. Later, passing yet another tour group at a time when I felt like I was struggling as a student, friend, and athlete, I couldn’t help but think: Do I really want to shed tears in front of these people and disrupt their illusions of the Yale lifestyle? No. I decided to pull myself together, exit stage left and cry backstage instead.

The irony about this discomfort is that I consciously picked this particular stage as the setting for my college years. I read the summary of the Yale College play, imagined my role and hoped that by playing this part I would be able to have a comfortable lifestyle and the career of my choice. Many of us accepted our offer of admission based on the image we picked up from pop culture. From popular depictions of Yale and Yale-bound students like Rory Gilmore and Molly from Booksmart, Yale is the place for quirky, try-hard, slightly judgmental, privileged students that jampack their schedules with extracurriculars—but also love solving crossword puzzles and may incidentally be brilliant in their fields of interest and study.

These stereotypes are Yale. We are socially conscious, multitalented, hard workers and we are very special.

I come from the Mountain West which, as a region, doesn’t send many people to Yale. When I meet new people back home, I’m careful with how I answer the “where do you go to college” question. If it does come up that I go to Yale, it’s usually met with a “Wow, you must be a genius.” (Reader, I am not.) If they realize that I struggle with basic math, they jubilantly point out, “she can’t do math and she goes to Yale!!.” (Reader, I am well aware of my mathematical difficulties.) This conversation, usually awkward at best, brings up a strange swirl of emotions for me. On one hand, I feel proud that I am a Yale student—but I also feel a little grossed out by this pride. Any Yale student with an ounce of self-awareness knows that a lot of luck and privilege put us on this campus. So how should I explain what Yale is to people back home without overly romanticizing nor downplaying it?

Once I arrived on campus, I realized that there are so many more types of students at Yale than I’d seen represented in popular culture or college brochures. This realization, while freeing, also made it hard to situate myself within the school. Upon internalizing that there was no singular, streamlined Yale student mold to follow, I felt overwhelmed by possibilities. Instead, I turned to my peers and compared myself to how they were navigating college to try to find my own roadmap. I often only feel like a hard worker when I see someone who seems to be working less. Or I feel bad at time management when I see someone spending their evenings socializing. Even the pastime of complaining can feel tricky when I gripe about my workload to someone taking two extra credits.

As I strain and toil to live up to my idealized expectations of the Yale student, I also observe other people seemingly excel in the areas I struggle with. This is when the Yale “production” leaves me feeling the most unmoored. It’s like a recurring nightmare: I’m onstage but I don’t know my lines; I know the role I’m supposed to play but not how to embody it in the right way.

As uncertainties of my belonging at Yale and the identity I want to inhabit on campus bounce around my mind, I can’t help but ask this fundamental question: Is the Yale persona a worthy ideal to aspire to? Should I go rogue and reject the role of the tryhard, perfection-seeking student, an extension of my earnest high school existence? Countless conversations with friends at Yale revolve around how we can divorce our sense of self from the unrealistically high expectations of being at Yale. Yet none of us seem to know how to actualize their implications. None of us want to be a “bad Yale student,” as we feel guilty when we prioritize other elements of our existence outside of our academic and extracurricular achievements. If we reject the Yale mold completely, we are left without a roadmap for how to “succeed,” with no indication that the post-Yale existence promised to us will remain intact. In the end, we go right back out on campus and continue acting like a standard Yale student to the rest of the world.

On Yale’s center stage—cross campus, of course—there are the cigarette smokers in the corner exuding a cool unconcernedness, as though they’ve unlocked the secrets to a post-worry student existence. There are the students who type away on their Macs while wearing fashionable sunglasses. And then the most elusive and mystifying cross campus creatures: the people sprawled out on picnic blankets chatting and enjoying a carefree moment.

As I analyze, and even feel jealous of, these characters in Yale’s production, I realize that it’s hypocritical to make assumptions based on these snapshots of people’s lives—but I keep doing it anyway. We live in such close proximity to each other, seeing each other in seminars, eating meals, in the bathroom and drunk over the weekends—you would think that we’d have more expansive views on each other. But it seems that we, still, can’t help but perform for each other as we insist on presenting polished exteriors everyday. I try to present myself in a way that mirrors my inner self, but the way I dress, where I study and so many other daily considerations are filtered—whether consciously or unconsciously—through what I think my Yale role requires.

Reasons to reject the die-hard Yale student stereotype go beyond personal doubts regarding our place in this institution—a few prominent ones include discomfort with Yale’s parasitic relationship with the city of New Haven, its lack of mental health resources for students, the romanticization of higher education, its investment in fossil fuels and Puerto Rican debt… the list goes on. But what does it even mean to reject this role? At the end of the day, most of us will graduate with a Yale degree, even those who are the most critical of the institution. We chose to come here and were also clear-eyed about the potential benefits this would likely afford us in the future. Grappling with Yale’s institutional problems necessitates getting comfortable living in the gray area. It’s okay to be thankful for what we have access to as Yale students, while also arming ourselves with these resources and skills to fight against injustices inside and outside of the institution. This tension between being grateful to Yale, being uncomfortable with Yale and trying to understand my own place on campus probably began with a hefty dose of imposter syndrome. But this line of inquiry has ultimately allowed me to at least try to be honest with myself when I feel like I’m performing for my peers or trying to embody a particular version of the Yale student. Maybe that’s all we can ask for at the end of the day—to acknowledge the many directions we are being pulled and be honest with ourselves.

On days when I feel more at peace with my place at Yale—maybe when I’ve gotten more than 7 hours of sleep or I’ve just had a good conversation with a friend— I see tour groups and feel gratitude rather than stage fright, grateful not for what Yale is meant to be, but for what it means to me: the dear friends I’ve met here, the eye opening moments I have in my Spanish Film, Gender & Sexuality, and Political Science classes, the hours spent playing frisbee at the IM fields, and joyous common room gatherings that go late into the night. A little over halfway through my time at Yale, I hope to continue coming into my own, think critically about my time at Yale and find a spot on the world’s stage that feels right for me. If nothing else, I’d like to put my own mark on the role I’ve been cast in.

The post Watching People, People Watching appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Wait — Kinnia, don’t you speak English, Cantonese, and Mandarin?”

“Yeah, but it’s more like 2.5 languages… you know?” They wrote my name in the box anyway, and I was left wondering how I had arrived at the number 2.5. I was pretty sure that Cantonese was the 0.5 — I just wasn’t sure why.

Growing up in Hong Kong meant that most of my classes were taught in English besides six years of Chinese classes in Mandarin, but I spoke Cantonese — my native language — everywhere else. One Friday afternoon in seventh grade, I left my Chinese class unsettled. I sprinted back home, desperately Googling the prosodic rules of ancient Tang poems on my sluggish Samsung Note — all because my teacher had commented on how these poems were meant to be recited in Cantonese, not Mandarin. Bursting into the kitchen, in a twelve-year-old’s piercing soprano, I started a fervent reading of Wong Wai’s “Yearning” in Cantonese. My mom was unimpressed, even after my five-minute lecture on how, prosodically, Cantonese makes the poem that much more meaningful. Scoffing, she said: 「相思你識條鐵咩」 (loosely: “what the hell do you know about yearning?”). In that moment, though, I felt like I did know what it was like to yearn — for validity, if not anything else.

I tell this story a lot; I enjoy how idiosyncratic and defensive it makes me seem. In the years since, I’ve picked up the habit of writing in spoken Cantonese (which makes use of the universal set of Chinese characters and some more niche, Canto-specific ones). This habit is like microdosing the drug that is unsolicited Cantonese poetry in the kitchen; I feel real, and illicit, when I do it. I almost never see spoken Cantonese written out officially, as TV captions or in government papers; Mandarin is always employed as the standard written form (which, in itself, represents a kind of superiority: there’s no fear that it will ever be lost in the tides of time).

Nonetheless, this drug has taken its toll on me: I have never felt as incompetent as I did one night, sitting cross-legged on my wobbly dorm chair, nervously chewing the tip of my pencil while helping my friend with her L3 Chinese homework. Embarrassingly, I wasn’t sure about the “official” written syntax which I knew her instructor must have expected; Beijing Mandarin, after all, has nuances that differ drastically from the Cantonese structures I am used to. I never told anyone how I labored over the Mandarin speaking portion in Yale’s Chinese placement test (I emailed to ask about protocols for native Cantonese speakers, only to find that Yale didn’t have a system for recognizing spoken proficiency in Chinese dialects), and, after twenty discarded voice recordings, settled for a garbled fusion of Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. Beyond feeling sorry for my Mandarin teachers in primary school, I also sensed that, in some way, I had failed to live up to my roots. If I couldn’t even help my friend with her Chinese homework in America, or express myself coherently on a test that was specifically designed to test Chinese abilities, what did I have apart from the impassive label, “Chinese,” on my passport?

Probably noticing how I struggled to correct her grammar, my friend turned to me and said, “It’s OK to not know Chinese perfectly — you’re an English major anyway!” It was clearly meant as a gesture of comfort, but it really hurt — in ways that I am only beginning to understand.

During family dinners, my grandma has told me, with an emphatic nod, 「讀英文好」 (“being an English major is good”). And I agree, especially the part of me that’s still thirteen and beaming onstage at school, clutching my certificate for “Best in Form for English.” But where does this pride come from, exactly? My parents like to recall how, thirty years ago, when Hong Kong was still a British colony, knowing how to English was the only skill you needed in the job market. English was the language of royalty; it was spoken in “rich people places”— areas where Western expats worked and drank — while Cantonese prevailed in the wooden slum villages my dad lived in. So I guess my family is proud that I am an English major, not because they necessarily value literature, but because it was and still is an achievement to speak the language of our colonizers — and to speak it well. So it goes: another authority, another “official” elite language, but the same illegitimate space that Cantonese is boxed into.

Sometimes, even I wonder whether the language I speak is legitimate. It’s a colonial debt we never repaid: my grandpa used to own a si6do1 (“store”), I take the dik1si2 (“taxi”) when I’m late for school, and my favorite drink is so1daa2 (“soda”). The words I speak are in-betweens, echoes of a language I do not own. Is it not tragically fitting that I, being in love with the real deal, am studying English in America?

In my senior year of high school, we studied Pai Hsien-yung’s Death of Chicago. After completing his PhD in Western Literature at the University of Chicago, the main character 漢魂 (literally “Chinese soul”) realizes that he does not know how to reconcile his abstract knowledge of Western literature with his Chinese identity — he spirals into depression, ultimately ending his life in Lake Michigan. By then, all my classmates knew I was planning on majoring in English in the US; this ensured that I was consistently the topic of discussion (and the butt of many insensitive jokes about suicide) in Chinese class. I would always respond with “the bodies of water in Connecticut are not picturesque enough” — but even then, I sensed cultural betrayal looming over me like the fog over Victoria Harbor in spring. My impending betrayal had been easy to ignore when I was confident enough in my own English abilities, yet lately I’ve been feeling like I have no right to speak in English classes at Yale, with my weirdly phrased sentences and jumbled thoughts.

Last Wednesday, my suitemates and I were jaywalking outside our college; we were so engrossed in a discussion that when a gray Toyota came speeding towards us, no one noticed but me. In a moment of frenzied panic, I screamed in the middle of the road, 「睇車啊!」 In my mind, this fleeting moment of unabashed Cantonese in the middle of New Haven is engraved as an eccentric diary entry I always return to; it is relieving to know that Cantonese is still my go-to during emergencies. The phrase was useless though — no one understood me. As the Toyota streaked behind us, my suitemate yelled in Mandarin 「你說啥?」 — I yelled back (in English) “Nothing!” and chuckled to myself all the way to Sterling.

When I speak, I settle — as my ancestors did — in the in-betweens, the illegitimacies. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking about how, in Cantonese, 寫, 瀉 and 捨 all have the same pronunciation; therefore, to say that I write is to say that I spill, which is also to say I experience diarrhea, which sounds exactly like I sacrifice. There is a brutal sense of tragedy: if I give up something on either side of me, does it mean that I will be saved from the chasm in between?

The post The In-Betweens appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The pole seared into my right shin as I hung four feet in the air. Sweat developed between my death-grips and the stainless steel. Hold on. Hold on. My knuckles started shivering when —

A knee shoved under my butt. My bones sang. I wrapped my left leg around and gripped the pole into my crotch. “Yup. Now twist your hips this way,” Judy said. I shifted rightward, digging my left inner thigh into the pole. It instantly started to burn. 

“Now let go with your hands.” 

In a breathless blur, I was contorted, one inch of inner thigh bearing the weight of my whole body. As I squeezed all my muscles together, I dimly glimpsed myself in the wall-length mirrors, my body slowly spinning like a rotisserie chicken. 

“Yeah!” Judy said. I peeled off the pole and collapsed to my feet. I’d done my first pole sit. She nodded at me encouragingly, shaking her dyed-red pixie cut and lavish lashes. 

Judy Jovanelly was 63. She was short and lean, and her abs bulged between her gray sports bra and blue briefs. I was 21, and my muscles wanted to crawl into bed and die. “Now, do it on the other side all by yourself,” she said. 

She cheerfully turned to the four other women in class that day, who were spread out among the room’s nine twelve-foot-tall poles, climbing in and out of their pole sits like squirrels. I looked at the pole, sighed, and put up my left shin. 

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I grew up doing ballet, which means I grew up punishing my body. In my earliest memories, I’m holding onto a barre, looking at myself in the wall-length mirrors, my head barely peeking above my hands. “Tailbones down!” the teacher snaps. Standing with my heels together, I squeeze my butt as hard as I can to wrench my thighs outward from each other. I’m supposed to rotate my legs like a Barbie doll so my feet make a 180 degree angle — but my hips joints aren’t flexible enough, and they stop way short. I look at them in the mirror and keep gripping, burning, getting nowhere.

I spent twelve years — over half my life — in these gray studios staring at my body in the mirror and criticizing it, looking for its inadequacies, trying to muscle them away. At any moment, I was doing a million things wrong, my reflection told me and my teachers confirmed. I’m extending my leg out to the side, willing my shin to my ear. It can be at least two inches higher. I’m arching my back with my arm above my head. My chest can be more lifted. Neck longer, tailbone lower, butt tighter and knees straighter. My peers had thin, perfect bodies and well-oiled joints. Being skinny and beautiful like them was not only my teenage-girl desire, but also my artistic duty. As time passed, I watched in horror as my body rounded out, my thighs thickened. I ate less, forced my toes to 180 degrees even though it tore my knees, and let the hatred from staring at my ugly body drive my leg a little higher. 

My religious education also disciplined my body. My Chinese evangelical church taught me to treat my body as suspect and its temptations as dangerous. I was taught to cover my body  and resist it and be better than it. When I was in elementary school, I got in trouble for giving my male friend a piggyback ride at church. I was supposed to give people side hugs only (boobs are treacherous). At church camp in high school, I caught a volleyball and got dress-coded because my green t-shirt showed my belly button. Over the years, I learned a theology that treated flesh as a metaphor for lust and sin. My body and what it wanted were dark forces that would lead my God-seeking soul astray.

When I got to college, I stopped doing ballet and looked for different ways of moving that weren’t about imposing external standards on my body, but instead were about following what my body wants. Last summer, I took my first heels dancing classes. Beyonce’s voice strutted our four-inch stilettos across the room and we whipped our hair in the dark. Back on campus, the low hum of Giveon’s voice filled the gray studio on Broadway, and I started swaying, weaving from side to side, tracing my hands up my torso and around my hair, grazing my neck with my fingernails. I arched my back and felt a rush through my entire body. 

I wanted more. And the Instagram algorithm provided. I watched video after video of women making gorgeous shapes with their bodies on a pole, whether in their living room or in a studio. I wanted to try that. I wondered what my body could do.

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After the intro class, where we learned basic ways to hold the pole — the cup grip, the handshake grip — it was time for the real stuff. Judy started off our Beginner 1 class with a sequence of tricep and bicep pushups. Then we moved into planks and stretches. I slid into my middle splits. Judy looked at me and barked, “Tits on the floor! Knees to Jesus!” I laughed and pressed my chest and cheek against the lacquered wooden floor. 

After we warmed up, we learned how to do a “peekaboo” (what it sounds like, but with your knees), a “wide slide” (sliding your back down the pole, legs spread), and a fan kick (sitting down and arcing your legs through the air). 

Then, it was time to start learning the building blocks of climbing the pole. First, upper body drills: pole holds. 

“Do we know what our lats are?” Judy asked the group. There was a second of silence. She shrugged off her crop top, revealing a strappy sports bra, and put her arms up in a V. She pulled her shoulder blades down, and her back erupted into a landscape of ridges. She relaxed, then did it again. “Lats!” 

Following her instructions, I placed my sternum against the pole, looked at my reflection in the steel, and grabbed the pole at my hairline. I wrapped my other arm around it and pulled down my lats as hard as I could. As we repeated the motion, she explained that the pole hold is a major component of the basic pole climb, and proper placement is key. When you’re up in the air, if your arms are too high or too low, you’ll lose strength and fall.

Up next, lower body drills: pole squats. I positioned one foot in front and one foot behind the pole, held the pole with both hands, rose up on my tippy toes, gripped the pole with my “knee pocket” (the soft spot between your knees, below the bone) and squatted down. That wasn’t too bad, I thought. 

Judy walked up to me and grabbed my right knee. It separated from the pole. “Uh-uh,” she said. She shouldn’t be able to do that: I wasn’t squeezing hard enough. If I were 6 feet in the air, I would’ve fallen on my ass.

“I am a technician,” she told the class. “I will beat technique ‘til it’s dead. Or you’re dead.” 

Before she started pole, Judy had been dancing all her life and teaching for most of it. She started training in tap, ballet and jazz in mom-and-pop dance studios in Ansonia, Connecticut, when she was three. After college, she worked as a secretary for Georgia Pacific Corporation and spent most of her career there, all while still teaching dance classes in small studios on the side and dancing in regional theater productions. From 1988 to 1992, she worked full-time as a dancer on a cruise ship, performing “jazz adagio” with a partner who would lift, spin and toss her. 

When she came back to Connecticut, she paused dancing and started a family. But soon she resumed taking classes and became a “gym rat.” One day in 2008, when she was 50, her friend stumbled across a pole dancing class for women over forty and invited Judy to come along. She went — and she loved it. It worked her muscles in a different way than the gym, and it was fun. 

The studio offered only twelve weeks of introductory material. Judy and her friend advanced to the point of flipping upside down and doing a “chopper,” where your legs hover in a side split like helicopter blades. But they weren’t ready to stop. They decided to continue training themselves through YouTube videos. Her friend installed a pole on the third floor of her loft condominium. The desktop computer was on the second floor, so they’d look at a video, run upstairs, forget what they’d seen, run back down again, rewatch the video, run back up, and finally give it a try.

It got absurd. They searched for alternatives, but all the studios with more advanced classes were at least an hour’s drive away. So they decided to build their own. 

They put an ad on Craigslist, found a pole dance instructor, and took the tiles out of the ceiling of a one-room studio in Trumbull. Seven months after they opened in 2010, she was watching a student who was supposed to be “advanced” go upside down and almost fall on her head. She thought to herself, why not create a structured curriculum that provided a foundation for dancing safely? This was an innovation at the time, when most aspiring pole dancers were learning from online videos, or at open-level classes. 

Judy and another student, a gymnast with a degree in exercise science, built a program designed to give a solid technical foundation, so someone can then “take the movement in whatever direction makes their little heart sing.” (Did anyone ever accuse her of starting a kind of cult? I ask. No, she laughs, and in fact it inspired other regional studios to adopt their own level-based models.) 

Judy started teaching too. The studio moved to a bigger space in Milford and grew to between 30 and 50 regulars, most of them women in their 20s and 30s. She loves teaching. “My favorite thing is watching them come in with Bambi legs and Bambi eyes, and then seeing them in two or three months do the most gorgeous spin or lift.” 

Judy was training, competing and improving consistently, but when she turned 52, things changed. “Menopause did me dirty, girl,” she laughed. Her knee and hip were flaring up from osteoarthritis and wear and tear from her incorrect dance training (I told her my knee cartilage could relate). She gained weight. And something changed in her body chemistry—her skin no longer stuck to the chrome poles that competitions and some dance studios use. 

In 2019, she had a hip replacement and a knee replacement, which gave her some mobility back. With a criticism towards her body that felt familiar to me, she went on Weight Watchers to lose weight. She started taking classes again. “The more I was able to slim down, the more positive I felt. The more positive that I felt, the more amenable I was to trying things.” 

Throughout COVID, she came in twice a week with her daughter, who had become an instructor, and worked on basic elements: climbing, choppers, leg hangs, fly holds, “elbow shit.” Eventually, she got stronger than she’d ever been. She could do moves that she couldn’t before her surgeries. 

When I asked her about being an older pole dancer, she rattled off the names of some famous, internationally ranked pole dancers: Greta Pontarelli, who’s 71, and Mary Caryl, who’s 68, both of whom found pole in their late 50s and have used it to reconnect with their bodies and explore their capacities. 

Last December, Judy had her other hip replaced. But the surgeon used a different method (a “posterior approach”) that cut a major tendon. He’d said that most people don’t notice the difference, but she sure did. “It’s a pain in the ass. Literally.” She was in physical therapy until May and didn’t touch pole dancing at all. She’s slowly, slowly working at it now, building up an exercise regimen, including pole squats, fan kicks, hollow body holds, and L-sits. She follows what her aging, healing body needs day by day. And she plans to keep dancing until she literally can’t. 

Pole opens one avenue for people to claim and display their bodies how they want. For Judy, that’s strictly non-sexual. She loves watching sexy-style pole. It looks like the dancer is “slow fucking” someone, and it’s gorgeous — “Gorgeous!” It’s just not for her. 

She’s also not into the trend among other studios that she calls the “woo-woo” space — “your femininity and your psyche and your this and your that and your energies and your chakras.” The New Age-y stuff rubs her the wrong way. Instead, she’s in it strictly for the physical challenge, keeping her aging body feeling strong and in shape.

“I like to be fit, I like to exercise,” she said. “I don’t prefer to do it in a gym, I’d rather do it dancing pole. And I want to have fun. I wanna laugh. Fun, fun, fun. Laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh.” 

But while Judy avoids “sexiness,” I crave the moments in class where I look seductively at myself sliding my asscheeks down the pole. Or when I let my Balanchine-disciplined hips grind on the floor like it’s someone’s thigh. I feel hot. I feel powerful. My belly button’s yawning, my boobs are bouncing, and if you were watching me you’d be unable to resist. 

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Feminists have long been up in arms about whether sensual performance can be empowering. Some have argued that erotic dance makes women into sex objects for male pleasure, while others see erotic dancers as free agents whose sexual expression expowers them—even when they’re pleasuring men. 

One thing is for certain: Pole dance in America has always had to do with race and sex. In 1893, a Syrian woman named Farida Mazar Spyropoulos performed a sensual belly dance at the Chicago World’s Fair to a song made up by the white male American theater manager — later politician — in charge of the exhibit. It was a smash. Legend has it that Mark Twain had a near-fatal heart attack watching her perform. The dance style exploded in popularity in America, and soon “Little Egypt” carnival shows were traveling around the nation, featuring “hoochie coochie” dancers — women who were Middle-Eastern, or who costumed themselves as such. They began using the wooden tent poles as a prop, gyrating and grinding on them to thrill their male audiences. 

Eventually, sensual pole dancing moved from tents to bars. By the 1920s, it was featured in burlesque shows, spicing up sets of comedy and minstrelsy. Pole dancing became a mainstay at striptease clubs, where “exotic” dancers would give clients lap dances and manipulate stage poles, or sometimes even dance on tables that had poles attached to them. Today, pole dancing is a key part of many strippers’ performances. 

In 1994, a Canadian stripper named Fawnia Mondey opened the first pole dance studio on record and started teaching pole dancing to non-strippers. Since then, pole studios have opened around the world, marketing pole dancing as a form of recreation and exercise, absent of sex or work. An entire pole sport competing network has also cropped up, including Pole Sport Organization and the US Pole Dance Federation, founded in 2011 and 2014 respectively. PSO’s competition categories include dramatic, entertainment, floorwork, and “exotic,” which their website says “celebrates sensual movement and concepts.” They’re evaluated on 10-point metrics like “flow and fluidity” and “quality of execution.” 

The pole fitness industry has been criticized for trying to distance itself from strippers. In the 2015 #notastripper movement, pole fitness enthusiasts posted pictures of themselves dancing and argued that pole is clean exercise, not dirty sex work. There are ongoing efforts to make pole dancing an Olympic sport, continuing a logic where competition is sanitary since dancers are performing for judges instead of men’s money. At the same time, pole fitness uses the aesthetics of sexual movement, and even continues the legacy of words like “exotic,” which comes from a long history of fetishizing Middle Eastern and “far Eastern” women like me because we’re foreign. They’re still using language and metrics originally made for men.

So when I’m sexy dancing, do I feel hot because I’m conforming to men’s desire for exotic bodies? Does my body escape my Christian repression and ballet discipline only to move into another arena of being seen, constructed, and made to please? I’m not performing to men — in fact, I’m paying $20 a class to pole dance without being watched by men — but I worry that the pleasure I get from watching myself is conditioned. At the same time, sexual movement feels inherent in my body, and I just feel good. When I’m doing L-sits and pole holds, pole reduces me to flesh. It’s an opportunity not only to sensually move, but also to be reminded of the brute physicality of my body. I’m inhabiting myself, regardless of who’s watching.\

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Twice a year, the studio hosts a showcase, where all the Girl Spot dancers who are going to compete in the biannual Pole Sport Organization competition perform their routines for their friends and family. This one would be the last before Judy’s retirement. I arrived just on time and paid the $10 entrance fee. The pole room was dark and pulsing with seductive music; the 60 or so people crammed around the room’s perimeter chatted loudly over the heavy basslines. I waved at Judy and scooted up to a corner at the front, right at the feet of a couple middle-aged women and next to a dad holding his two elementary school-aged kids. 

The next hour was a blur of bare limbs and ear-splitting cheering. Kat, another homegrown instructor, introduced each performer. They represented a range of bodies and backgrounds: thinner, thicker, Asian, white, Black, masculine, feminine. Some had danced all their lives, some just started months ago. As each performed, Judy watched intently from the side. 

In Kerry’s performance, she climbed the stationary pole dressed as a wolf and leaned out to claw at her Little Red Riding Hood friend. At one point, she contorted her body into a knot around the pole. Holding onto one foot, she tried to grab the other foot but missed. I looked at Judy — she was leaning forward, hands clutched in front of her chest, her eyes laser focused. On Kerry’s third try, she got it. Judy fell back and clapped little rapid claps, lips forming a “woo!” as the room roared. 

Judy has told me that she feels like a mother hen to the community. Her Instagram handle is @polemamact. People get married, have kids, make friends, and find their home away from home here. “I’ve been the facilitator of a lot of good shit,” she said. 

The community does need literal buying in — classes are $20 to $25 each. It’s about overhead, Judy said — paying the instructors, paying for rent and maintenance. The customer base she’s targeting isn’t necessarily “a broke-ass college student,” she said, but someone with disposable income. 

But for those who can afford entrance to the community (I’ve spent $80 so far), it’s beautiful. Dancing pole, I feel hot, and that feels good. Judy feels strong, and that feels good. We all acutely feel our muscles and bones, and that feels good. No matter their skill level or body type, the dancers were having fun.

Marisa went last. She started in 2018, with zero previous dance or gymnastics training, and now is at The Girls Spot’s advanced level and teaches Pole 1 and 2 classes. She started moving to the throbbing bass of “Human” by Sevdaliza. Soon, she was holding herself sideways on the pole, with one leg threaded between her arms so she was in a full split. The light caressed her slowly spinning body. 

She was gorgeous. 

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In my last Beginner 1 class with Judy, we finally learned the skill that all that pole conditioning had been preparing us for: the pole climb. I propped my right shin up, took a deep breath and threw my left calf around the pole, so I hung between my hands and my (tightly squeezed!) knee pocket. I dug in with my shins, and stood up so my whole body was glued to the pole, forearms pressing into my face. (“Put your hoo-hah on the pole!” Judy yelled.)

The next step was to let go of my legs and crunch my knees up like a vertical inchworm. I tensed my back and arms, willed every muscle in me to fire, went for it—and I slipped down. 

Ugh. 

I went to a plastic bin on the side, sprayed rubbing alcohol onto a paper towel, rubbed it up and down the pole to remove my sweat. I tried it again—and slipped again. One of my classmates tossed me a bottle of Dry Hands liquid chalk to smear on my hands. Judy put on a rock ballad, and we started freestyling. My hands quickly sweat through the powder and slicked the pole, and I kept trying to attack my bodily fluids with rubbing alcohol. 

Near the end, I decided to give the pole climb another go. I set my shin, gripped on, stood, inchwormed up—then grabbed the pole with my feet and pushed back into the original position.

I got it. 

I was holding myself five feet above the ground, the pole rock-solid between my legs and hands. My muscles were singing, and I felt triumphant. Instinctively, I looked for Judy, but she was focusing on someone else across the room. I looked at myself in the mirror, and my body looked strong and firm, perched up there like a bird. I stayed for one, two, three more burning seconds before I let go and slid back down.

The post PERSONAL ESSAY: The Pole Climb appeared first on Yale Daily News.

To combat the isolation, I started watching “Inventing Anna.” The show follows the true story of a plucky journalist named Vivian Kent as she investigates a fake German Heiress named Anna Delvey who hoodwinked the New York elite. Anna — or rather, “Inventing Anna” — changed my life.

Anna’s character spoke to my soul. She had impeccable fashion sense, goddess-like networking capabilities, a deliciously dramatic circle of friends, a really weird accent and a propensity for engaging in semi-illegal activities. She was who I dreamed of becoming. The only downside to my fascination with Anna was that I developed a deeply unfeminist urge to marry rich and spend my days being disgustingly wealthy.

With this in mind, I shifted my adoration to a more ethical character: Vivian Kent, the reporter who investigates Anna. With her razor sharp wit and intense stare, Vivian Kent secured forbidden interviews, delved into intrigues and asked tough questions, scribbling everything into her super chic notebook. 

Soon, I was lost in visions of a dazzling journalistic career. Instead of thinking about the bedpans I was scrubbing, I imagined the steamy, fantastical realm of a newsroom, the thrill of rubbing shoulders with celebrities, the jolt of adrenaline incurred by a rapidly approaching deadline. I dreamed of living on sporadic paychecks while searching frantically for the next big story. True, the desire to be a starving reporter is probably just as troublesome as the desire to be really rich, but at least it’s not unfeminist. 

As I watched episode after episode of “Inventing Anna,” I saw both Vivian and Anna taking risks. They made moves. They knew what they wanted. They weren’t content to let things stay the way they were; they wanted big changes. They got what they wanted.

I began to reevaluate my own position, my own boring summer: What did I want?

Then it came to me. I wanted my life to be like Anna and Vivian. 

In order to do this, I had to take a few steps. 

Step 1: Find the Next Big Story

For Vivian Kent, living in a busy city, the Next Big Story could be around practically any corner. Finding a story in my small town was a bit more challenging.

But then the only nursing home in my small town decided to close its doors, outraging residents and community members. Here it was, dropped into my lap, the Next Big Story. Now, I just had to figure out how to report it. 

The slight issue with that plan: my journalism experience is limited to being a lifelong NPR nerd and taking approximately six reporter training sessions at the YDN building. Fortunately, Vivian Kent showed me the real key to being a successful journalist …

Step 2: Get a Cool Notebook

I went to the dollar store and bought a spiral-bound red notebook. Fueled by dollar store chips — which, by the way, are now $1.25, thanks, inflation — and confident that my path to journalistic excellence was basically guaranteed by my new red notebook, I decided to … 

Step 3: Leverage All Connections

I cold-emailed the editor of a local newspaper with my story pitch. I mentioned Yale immediately and said I was basically a pro because of all those YDN reporter trainings. I even sent a writing sample — and prayed he wouldn’t realize it was a human interest piece and not real, hard-hitting journalism. 

It sounds bold but hear me out. Along with some other maxims learned in my first year, including “milk the hell out of the alumni network” and “a buttery buck saved is a buttery buck that can be exploited for lots of free grilled cheese,” I discovered that name-dropping Yale often grants me access to things I am completely unqualified for, like writing a breaking news story about a nursing home closure. 

And sure enough, the editor said he was delighted to work with me on the story. He even offered in advance to pay me for my article. 

That’s when I realized I was in over my head. Pay me? What if it turned out the article I was theoretically going to write was complete garbage?  I felt like Anna Delvey, sweet-talking her way onto a private jet without paying for it. The world was at my fingertips, but one false move, and I would be outed as an imposter. 

Then I remembered something Anna used to say:  “You look poor.” Anna was right. If I wanted to be successful, if I wanted to be a real journalist, I needed to …

Step 4: Dress for the Part

Thankfully, in small-town Montana, the pace of fashion trends is always a few years behind, so an anti-wrinkle blouse from the clearance rack at TJ Maxx basically counts as designer. Wrinkle free and ready to write, I proceeded to knock on doors and visit facilities and call old ladies who went to my church.

After gathering all the information I needed, via lots of Google searches and Facebook stalking, it was the moment of truth. Was my journalist act enough to actually write the Next Big Story? 

Anna Delvey faced a moment of truth too. The huge bank loan she was trying to secure — so that her fake socialite life could be real — fell through. Then, stranded in Morocco without a functioning credit card, she was nearly jailed for not paying her astronomical bills. Just like Anna in Morocco, my next task was to …

Step 5: Panic

I panicked about interviewing techniques. Who was I, thinking that binge watching nine episodes of a random Netflix show could teach me how to secure an exclusive interview, crack people open and capitalize on their secrets?! 

I panicked about the fact that 50 percent of my sources knew me, my parents and my grandparents on a first name basis, probably held me when I was still in diapers and if I said anything that made the sources look bad, my life would be miserable forever.  

I panicked about impending deadlines. In the show, Vivian Kent is motivated to write her story by the imminent birth of her child. I briefly considered this form of motivation, but decided it wasn’t feasible for me.

Eventually, though, it was time to … 

Step 6: Do it. 

I relistened to my interview tapes, I reviewed notes, I fact-checked names and quotes. I filled a Mason jar with minty water — very VIP — and forced myself to sit at the desk until I had a passable draft. Then I wrote the article. 

And lo, it was published! On the front page! And there was my name in print underneath it, just like a real journalist! Vivian Kent would be proud of my article, and Anna Delvey would be proud that I absolutely and completely improvised my way through it.

After I wrote the article, I went to visit the newspaper office. It wasn’t the mystical newsroom I thought it would be. It was a 100-year old shag-carpeted building with a staff of exactly three people. I read some previous editions of the paper and realized the editor I “hoodwinked” was actually writing 90 percent of the articles himself. Maybe he just let me write the article because he was tired of doing all the reporting alone.

In any case, Anna Delvey and Vivan Kent taught me that you can get a lot of things just by asking for them. Take a page out of Anna’s book and steal a jet. Or buy a cool red notebook. Or something like that. With a little imagination, you too can reinvent yourself.

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