I walk down the stairs. The sun is just rising: I can see the pinkish-orange light starting to filter through the windows facing the mountains. It’s painfully early, and I am painfully awake. My dad’s already up, and is working on the Seattle Times Jumble: it’s like the Wordle — but in print — and you already have the letters. A bowl of peanut butter oatmeal waits for me. I take my seat at my end of the table, and turn to the Nation page, A2, with the ticker-line of “odds and ends” and “on this day in time.” For 15 minutes, we enjoy the quiet chirping of the finches that haven’t yet mistaken glass windows for air, and the momentary peace before a busy day yet to come. 

My most favorite moments of 2023 have not come in the highs — not by a long shot. Many of them have instead come in destabilizing moments of solitude. They are the moments when all of a sudden, I snap out of it all, and realize that I see the same little flock of fat finches on the sidewalk beneath the Branford dining hall every morning, and that there are always three little birds who don’t seem to be afraid of me walking by. It’s those “what the hell?” moments that sharpened my focus on that feeling I have at the kitchen counter with my dad. Or, alternatively, the moments when I narrowly avoid getting hit by a car crossing Elm. I want to say to the honking Kia driver: “Oops. I was distracted, but for some reason, it felt great.” 

I think we all have those moments at Yale when we float above the crowd. The feeling is more acute at the beginning of the year, when the first-years arrive and the intensity of the journey here comes back into focus. I was reminded of this intensity a few days ago, when I saw what admissions officers had written about me in my Yale admissions file. I was told I shouldn’t look at it before junior year, but I wish I hadn’t heeded that advice. There was little in there I didn’t already know, but much I needed to be reminded of. 

After I saw my admissions file, it was clear that something hadn’t come across: I had kept something to myself, even if unconsciously. I played the cello from third grade all the way to the end of high school. It was something I loved to do. Never particularly competitive, I was part of a truly wonderful school music program and did my best, diligently practicing and asking for harder music when I had the chance. My alarm would go off at 5:30 a.m. on days when I had solo auditions for orchestral pieces, and I would run through tricky measures until the reps did more harm than good.

I remember spending hours on a section of Elgar’s “Nimrod” during my freshman fall of high school, a piece traditionally played to honor a director or conductor of an orchestra who has passed away. The summer before, our conductor had died in a tragic swimming accident. The piece wasn’t technically difficult, rather emotionally charged: it had matter to it. When I graduated, it was “Nimrod” playing in my head as I left my high school parking lot, a farewell to the highs, lows, wins, losses and everything in between. 

Today, my cello is more of an expensive coat rack than anything else. I auditioned for an orchestra the first week of my freshman year, but didn’t get in. I absolutely boofed a sight-reading passage — never my strong suit — and was so overwhelmed by the first week of college that I left the audition in tears. In the time since, I’ve only played for myself, if my neighbors allow it. Cello was, and always will be, something I do for myself, and now, by myself. 

In my admissions notes, there was no mention of cello: but at the same time, I didn’t write about it. It only showed up on my transcript, as “Chamber Orchestra, grades 9-12.” In high school, I was in the music crowd. At Yale, I float above it. And in 2023, I feel I’ve floated above it all. “Nimrod” will come on — thank you, Spotify Wrapped — or I’ll listen to my friend sing in Schola Cantorum; or someone will run one of any number of red lights; or I’ll see the fat finches and I’m taken back to my scales at 5:30 a.m. Taken back to the sometimes painful, but always profound solitude that has come to define this year. 

The post Solitude appeared first on Yale Daily News.

A mere four gifts are reliable: Thorlo tennis socks, Dunlop double-yellow squash balls, high-quality polo shirts, or Ralph Lauren “Andrew-cut” chino shorts (which they don’t make anymore – but getting the “9-inch Stretch Classic Fit Chino Short” hemmed is a close substitute). Every Christmas and birthday, he receives some combination of these four items, from myself, my mom, and my brothers. On another note, he’s always on the lookout for the perfect boutique hotel in Phú Quốc Vietnam.

But should one ever wish to deviate from this list of tried-and-true classics, they would find more difficulty than a novice trying to beat a chess grandmaster at his own game. Any book on European history, his favorite subject? Either he has read it, is uninterested, or finds the contents a bit light. Clothes outside of his usual uniform? Not the right “feel.” The only other thing he particularly appreciates would be a bar of Cadbury milk chocolate, a gift card to Home Depot, or possibly Holabird Sports — or perhaps a selection of thoughtfully curated gift hampers sydney, all of which work, but there’s something rather hollow to gift cards under the Christmas tree.

I’ve tried almost everything in an attempt to get my father an original gift, I checked some great Old British coin that I knew it was a great gift. Of course I’m keen to give him things I know he will enjoy, but there are only so many Thorlos a girl can buy before she starts to feel like somewhat of an inattentive daughter. When I was little, I even tried making those little chore coupons: “one free car wash,” met with “Anabel, that’s something I enjoy doing with you anyways.” 

With all this said, my father is by no means an uninteresting or bland man. In many ways, I see his sometimes excruciating particularity a reflection of a fascinating life well-lived. My dad is 70, a retired airline pilot who flew transatlantically, has had Richard Branson sleep on his couch and somehow had a stint playing professional backgammon in Europe. He’s painfully knowledgeable, to the point where I jump for joy whenever I catch him out on some obscure art historical fact he hasn’t had the pleasure of filing away during his 5 a.m. Wiki sessions. When I was six, he taught me how to spell — and know the meaning of! — onomatopoeia and antidisestablishmentarianism. What better words for a first-grader to appreciate the sounds of nature and the forces-counter-forces driving 19th-century English politics. No, my father is not a boring man. He just happens to have experienced just about everything he’d like to. One would be well-served to stick to the list — and, while you’re at it, write a letter to Ralph Lauren asking for a return of the “Andrew” line. 

Instead, to satisfy that internal craving to “give a meaningful gift,” I write my dad letters. Of course, there’s more to why I write, and not just to my father. When I write, I get to share what all the little things mean to me, not just that I’ve noticed them in the first place. For example, when I get home from school during breaks, he’s always cleaned my car and has Trader Joe’s chocolate chip cookies waiting for me. It’s my dad’s way of saying hello, I missed you. When I write him letters, it’s my way of saying “Dad, it means more than you know that you do these things.” In letters to friends, I’m able to say “you had no idea how hard of a day I was having, but when you sent me that picture of you at the farm mining for carrots I laughed so hard water blew out of my nose but then I started crying and it’s a lot less embarrassing to tell you this now than it was then.” At the time, I just replied with that little “Ha Ha” in iMessage. 

The earliest letters to my dad are written on wide-ruled paper, with a blue ballpoint pen in a loopy, childish scrawl. The more recent iterations are typed and printed on A5 paper, but I sign each one. Without revealing their contents too much, these letters are most often reflections of the period of time they span. Gratitude for my dad driving me to and from school each day. Reminisces over trips or adventures we’ve shared. And now, more often than not, lessons I’ve realized that I’ve picked up from him and my mother. Kindness, dignity and respect, in no particular order. 

For people that have it all — or want for little — words are a timeless gift. I recently gave a speech introducing my mom, during an event where she accepted an athletic achievement award. As I was writing the speech, I reflected on how few opportunities we have to publicly tell the people we care about how much they mean to us. But in truth, we have private opportunities all the time: even if words aren’t your forte, something as simple as “you mean a lot to me, and I’m grateful for the time we spend together” can be infinitely more valuable than even the most well-chosen sweater. 

So to Dad — and Mom, and my brothers, and the entire village that supports me back home — as the holiday season approaches, know I’m not writing my letter to Santa, but rather to you. Postmarked and tucked in an envelope with care, know that lots of thought — not to mention little bits of my heart — are thoughtfully placed, right in there. 

The post The Perfect Gift for the Person Who Has Everything appeared first on Yale Daily News.

But I haven’t been to Yale-Harvard. 

My first year, it was a clerical error: I thought The Game was the weekend after Thanksgiving, not before (and, naively, that Harvard, too, had the entire week off for Thanksgiving. Suckers). Cut me some slack; I had a lot on my mind: L4 French was a doozy, as was the aftermath of the wildest Hallowoads the world has ever seen. I watched The Game in my pajamas, at home with my parents and my dog, listening to my football-savvy father yell at the TV about first downs and passing lanes and zone reads. Alas, there are still areas where my Ivy League education has failed me. Kick ball through sticks, run into colorful rectangle. Golazo! 

My second year, I took a much-needed and long-awaited trip to Europe with my mom, visiting Paris and London. I genuinely did not care about missing The Game. Tickets were either scarce or abominably expensive (the Amtrak Northeast Regional is God’s curse unto man), and besides, I’ve heard the party scene in Cambridge is lame. Instead, I spent that Saturday with my mom at the Turbine Building of  the Tate Modern, blinded by Jenny Holzer’s Artist Rooms and looking at Cézannes. We followed up with coffee and excellent shopping. I felt zero remorse — though it did seem to be a beautiful day in Cambridge and an even more beautiful day to be a Dawg. 

But this past Tuesday, I made the fated trek to Roy Tompkins House and picked up my very own, brand new, shiny, sparkly Harvard-Yale ticket, which, regrettably, did not fit into my phone wallet (I still need to make sure I haven’t lost it to the ether of my backpack. Ticket office, can we work on these dimensions, please?). It was a major moment. Yale-Harvard. 

I’m psyched for The Game. I haven’t worn a temporary tattoo since about 2009 nor have I ever been to a football game where I was even marginally interested in what was going on on the field. Only American football could have a “special team” within a team; it’s the only sport where there’s more jargon than there is athletic movement. But any form of competition presents an opportunity for one of my favorite pastimes: trash talk. 

For example: did you know the Crimson boast a defensive back named Sterling Scott? As in, the long-lost, switched-at-birth twin of the notorious, infamous, will-never-be-forgotten Yale goalkeeper Scott Sterling? Will Harvard’s trainer also take Mr. Scott “off the field like a mustached lion dragging a gazelle through the Serengeti?” I certainly hope so (in jest, of course). 

Or, perhaps even better: Ben Abercrombie — from no less than Hoover, Alabama! Just looking at his roster photo, it’s obvious this man was born to be Mr. Homecoming, doused in Abercrombie: Fierce cologne. Too bad the boy-next-door isn’t at home — not that that’s served Harvard well in the past, anyway. 

Finally, get this one: Cali Caneval, of Florida! The only sad part about this man is that he is from Fort Lauderdale, not Cape Canaveral. I think the name in and of itself warrants a move, unless he’s particularly keen to avoid the very, very odd Elon Musk and the increasingly odder Jeff Bezos (poor NASA. What ever will they do with the billionaires?). Bonus points for Cali in that he’s a kicker — probably the only member of the Harvard team that does the term “football” justice — but also, he was a two-year captain of his high school soccer team. All I’m saying is that for Harvard, all roads lead back to Scott Sterling, and we all know how that turned out. Boola boola, baby! 

I’ve spent two-plus years waiting for The Game (ok, not really, but go along with my drama, here). Beyond the obvious upsides, I’m simply thrilled to trek out to the athletic fields in the rain (70 percent chance: you must be joking) to watch the Men of Yale potentially give other men concussions and cha-cha-slide into the end zone for points of various value. For God, for Country and for the traditions of Yale — Huck Farvard.

The post Yale junior attends first Yale-Harvard game appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It’s me, hi. I’m not the problem, it’s you. 

On a recent, truly terrible Wednesday night, I found myself in need of a deeply quiet study space. On the heels of a physics exam and eve of a biochemistry exam, I headed to Bass Library. I’ve spent too much time in the stacks. Starr is still somewhat of a no-go, given my experiences last spring. And this year’s first years have somehow decided that residential college libraries are stand-ins for experimental, avant-garde social clubs. 

I situate myself in the back corner of Bass, lower level, at one of those sad little desks with the dividers where the only light comes from the fluorescent strip that resembles my father’s under-cabinet workbench lamp. I sit down with the seven lectures I need to review, a book full of notes, and two practice tests. I have the machinery primed to execute my plan. Review keratin, collagen, and silk, then Ramachandran plots and, finally, my amino acids. I. Am. Ready. To. Biochemistry.

“Dude!!! That’s sick!” 

Okay, I’m still primed. I’ve got this. I will not be nervous for this exam. I have all the tools I need to succeed. I will not drink three cups of coffee tonight. 

“Wait, bro, say that again? I couldn’t hear you!” 

I CAN HEAR YOU. 

I put my noise-canceling headphones on (I’ve upgraded since last spring, when AirPods weren’t enough). I’ve graduated from train sounds; instead I have Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto on, the one with the smashing cellos entering like French New Wave cinema in the 1950s. I cannot explain how bloody loud this music is. I am sitting in the literal bowels of Bass Library with twenty fortississississimo instruments being piped into my skull, and yet:

“BRO!!!” followed by full-volume laughter. Poor Rachmaninoff. If only he knew his virtuosic music would be humbled in the face of cluelessly rude first years. 

Now, dear readers, I’d like to point out here that I am by no means a confrontational person. I hate conflict. I have a hard enough time correcting my coffee order, let alone approaching a gaggle of first-year boys imploring them to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, COUNTRY AND YALE BE QUIET. But the present circumstances have left me no choice. I emerge from my sad little cave in the corner at 9:15 on a Wednesday night, turn around and realize that there is a ring of boys, no less than twenty in number, bro-chatting just near the stairs. These individuals are not studying. They are not moving. There are no laptops, p-sets or notebooks. They are not speaking the language of the library, rather the language of RUDENESS. They are Harvard students, in my eyes.

“Hey, I don’t want to have to do this, but this is a library. It is incredibly distracting, not to mention rude. There are any number of places on this campus you could be having this conversation, but here is by no means one of them.” I already know my cheeks are stoplight-red, but I am so beyond livid it is wild. 

They say nothing — aha! I’ve got them! But they offer no apology either. Are they ashamed? Mad at me? Humbled? Who knows. I turn around and go back to my corner. I put my headphones back on. 

But then, I hear it, in the wake of Rachmaninoff’s final crescendo: “Dude, she’s so annoying.” 

You know what? Fine. I’m the annoying library-goer who ruins the party and spoils everyone’s fun. Boo-hoo. But you know what else? There is, in fact, a far better place to have a full-on chat on this campus. Or whisper-yell over your neglected Econ p-sets. Or call your mother, or your brother, or your suitemate who’s making a trip to the liquor store for this weekend.

Funnily enough, I, too, have a social life. I have friends who I enjoy laughing with and yelling at and genuinely messing around with. It’s not as if I hate noise in general. But I also know that if I am in Bass, Lower Level, Starr or, for that matter, any library on campus, surrounded by people deep in chemical structures, readings by philosophers and linguistics homework, I would almost rather be hit by a Yuttle than put up with your mindless twittering. Almost.

So here it is, once and for all: disrespectfully, please shut up, and now, as an addendum — get out. 

Sincerely, 

Literally everyone that’s ever gone to a library to actually do work, ever. 

The post Was “disrespectfully, please shut up” not a strong enough sentiment? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid; it’s cliché to say that this is why I love reading, but reading was the pastime that staved off loneliness. My brothers are decades older than me; I was closer and more comfortable with my parents’ friends than kids my own age. My after-school activities all throughout elementary school were remarkably straightforward: watch “Rachel Ray: 30-Minute-Meals” — the best programming on my parents’ hand-me-down 30-channel box television, take free throws in the driveway, or read. Today, I am a terrible cook, a sub-50 percent free throw shooter and a student who spends more time looking at the haphazard stacks of books beneath my common room window than actually reading them. 

I wish I could read for enjoyment more at Yale. I read my bookmarks more than the books themselves; my biology assignments make excellent placeholders. I used to try to read for fifteen minutes before bed every night, either an opinion piece from The New York Times or J.M. Coetzee’s “Elizabeth Costello.” I chose to be busy instead, and write a lot, too. I find it bizarre that I write for fun more than I read for fun; perhaps that’s why I spend an embarrassing amount of time on Thesaurus.com. 

It was in the context of this longing that I chose Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I had watched “The Center Will Not Hold” while jogging on the treadmill. I felt guilty that my first and only exposure to Didion was accompanied by violent huffing and puffing, particularly as she visibly withered away in the film. 

It was the only work by Dideon that Barnes & Noble had in stock. On my twentieth birthday, I wanted honesty and an accurate description of a worst-case scenario. In my free time, I wanted both the amusement of Tartt’s academic novel and the integrity of Dideon’s prose. As I read about art history and cell signaling and twentieth-century smallpox eradication for my courses, topics that all start to feel a bit hand-wavey the more time you spend with them, I wanted to read something that was raw and decidedly real. I’m not the first person to say this, but “The Year of Magical Thinking” reminds us that we all die.

I was a year older, still closer to the beginning of my life than the end, but spending my time staring at Kaplan-Meier curves and reading about childhood tuberculosis in low-income countries and trying like hell to understand what the seventeenth-century Dutch were trying to do with vanitas art. My courses this semester are preoccupied with death: evading it, eradicating it, respecting it and understanding it. 

But if I’m being truthful, I picked up “The Year of Magical Thinking” because I wanted to know what would happen and what I might feel when I eventually lose someone I love. I do not presume to live a perfectly privileged life; I know this day will come. 

A few days ago, I came across an old Yale Daily News article, published just after Commencement for the class of 2012. Written by Marina Keegan, it’s titled “The Opposite of Loneliness,” and was featured in a special Commencement issue of the News. A few days after graduation, Marina died in a car accident. She was driving with her boyfriend to Cape Cod, a job at the New Yorker awaiting her after summer’s end. Her prose is made even more ephemeral by her fate, but I couldn’t shake a line: “We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.” She tells the class of 2012 to “make something happen to this world.” She tells them, too, that they can change their minds. They can start over. They can do whatever they want. 

Somewhere between Rachel Ray and Marvin Chun’s first-year address, I forgot about this freedom. I didn’t want to explore “what-ifs” anymore. I didn’t want to imagine, or speculate, or dream a dream that didn’t align with what I had been thinking for the last ten years. I wanted to do what had to be done, to put in the work, reap the rewards, and continue on my way. I wanted to be prepared; I conflated the word “possibility” with “risk.” 

There is a possibility things could go wrong. There is a possibility that my hard work will not pay off. There is a possibility that my family will get COVID-19 and die. There is a possibility that bad things will happen. There is a possibility that I will make the wrong decision, and all of this scares me more than I can begin to articulate. 

Yet none of this has materialized. Joan Didion is right; “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” My preparation is pointless. When I chose “The Year of Magical Thinking,” I told my dad that I wanted to appreciate Didion’s writing – I, too, wanted to be able to write a sentence so beautiful it hurt. But in reality, I picked it up because in the year 2023 I was turning twenty and he was turning seventy and all of a sudden his age was something I was meant to be concerned with. I felt in my bones the possibility of big, scary feelings lurking around a blind corner.

Though I wish I could read for enjoyment at Yale, I realize that I never really read for enjoyment in the first place. I’m always looking for answers, and sometimes answers to questions I don’t need to be asking. I don’t need to know what will happen if I lose someone. It will happen, and I will be okay. I am too young to waste this promise of possibility to fear, to lose this time in the pursuit of answers, only to let these answers gather dust on the ledge beneath the window. 

Books always filled a void, but if I’m being honest, that void no longer exists at this school. Like Keegan, I’m in the web of this “elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness.” Like Keegan, I have no idea what is around the next bend. All I know is that each birthday, I will pick out a book. I might read it, I might not — who knows. I am “in love, impressed, humbled and scared.” The answers to my questions are out there somewhere. And for now, that knowledge is enough. 

The post Age 20: “The Year of Magical Thinking” appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Composed by Benjamin Beckman ’23, in part to fulfill his Composition senior project, “Passage” premiered in the Saybrook College Underbrook on Saturday evening. Presented by the Opera Theater of Yale College, Yale’s only student-run opera organization, and in collaboration with the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra, “Passage” featured librettist Adam Haliburton It was directed by Joaquín Lara Midkiff ’25 and produced by Jacqueline Kaskel ’24.

Haliburton, who is completing his doctorate degree in East Asian Languages and Literatures, was quick to note the pleasure of working with Beckman. 

“[Beckman] combines knowledge, talent, and taste. I was sure about the first two, but when I started to work with him, it was clear he had all three,” Haliburton said. He added that “Passage” marks the end of more than 10 years at Yale for him, and described the show as a “farewell” to the institution. 

“Passage,” which drew from the Noh-period play by Zeami Motokiyo that is a subject of Halliburton’s dissertation, chronicles the trials of competing seaside armies and probes broad philosophical questions surrounding loss, torment, responsibility and absolution. 

“It’s a pretty interesting structure similar to that of Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘To The Lighthouse,’” Beckman said. “There’s a beginning and an end, but no middle. It’s very cool, how the piece reckons with agency.”

Beckman centers the composition on a chilling flute melody that repeats and transforms itself throughout the piece, propelling the show forward with astounding technical clarity. His prowess and intimate knowledge of the opera instrumentation — the ensemble was scored for flute, clarinet doubling bass clarinet, piano, percussion, string quartet and electronics, alongside the chorus — is lyrically rich. Grounded in the strengths of each individual contributor, “Passage” offers a resoundingly cinematic experience. Both libretto and score move as one, and this intricacy keeps “Passage” lively and balanced. 

Midkiff emphasized the collaboration between Haliburton and Beckman. Indeed, “Passage” is the epitome of the modern opera: timeless and clear, it is obvious that its primary concern is emotive beauty that is both accessible and engaging. 

“It’s all about Ben and Adam and the beauty and synergy between the two,” Midkiff added. 

Beckman, whose orchestral music has been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, and the Yale Symphony Orchestra, has been writing art songs since the age of 15, and has written 27 such pieces since. With an extensive catalog of compositions ranging from jazz-fusion to post-rock to traditional Jewish cantillation, Beckman describes himself as creating “a new and unique sound for the modern world.”

The Opera Theater of Yale College was founded in the fall of 1998. 

The post Beckman ’23’s “Passage” soars as Yale’s first original opera premiere in 30 years appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This piece was supposed to be about someone I was grateful for. On a recent run, I mentioned to a friend how I didn’t want to write what I considered a “basic” gratitude piece, about how I didn’t realize I was grateful for X person until I had Y experience and how I realized the positive impact that X person had on my life. I’m weary of this arc: I can tell you now, as I did then, that the people in my life matter to me. That sentiment has not changed, but that sentiment is not what this piece is about.

The last three years have been a game of musical chairs, documented in more than 250 pages of journal entries. Some of this chaos is public, but most of it is not (the handwriting is indiscernible, anyway).The trifecta of Yale Plagues: mono, the flu and COVID-19 (twice). Mood changes, major changes, saying hello, goodbye and hello again to social groups, sports and academic passions. Sixteen flights in 2022, then saying goodbye to being a teenager.  The highs and lows, for the most part, canceled each other out. Somehow, the path is still a bit hazy, but I know it exists. 

Through all of this, I am most grateful for one person: myself. I am grateful for all of the luxuries that touch me: my parents, my friends, my brothers and boyfriend and professors and Yale and the fact that this place has yielded more than I could have ever dreamed of when I wrote on that piece of paper on my bathroom mirror that I wanted to go to an Ivy League school. I am grateful — more than ever — for my health and the fact that I am eager to wake up and start the day most mornings. I am grateful that I have learned, both in an academic sense and an emotional sense, about what it means to have a center that I can always return to. I am grateful that I no longer want to live a life of demanding extremes, no longer want to throw myself headfirst into activities or emotions. These lists of what happened and what I gained go on and on, but if there’s one thing I can trust about myself, it’s that they will only grow longer in the years to come. There will always be more, and I believe I will always be exploring the boundary between superabundance and balance. But for now, I relish in the comfort and surety of trusting myself. 

When my parents moved into our home in the early 2000s, my grandmother gave them two magnolia trees to plant at the end of the driveway. She passed away of malignant, late-stage melanoma a year after I was born. When the flowers bloom every summer, my mom clips a few and leaves them on the kitchen counter. I sit at the table and read the Seattle Times with my dad. Their perfume is sweet. 

Three days ago, the pink magnolia tree in the Branford courtyard bloomed, and this morning, a member of my future lab mentioned the potential of a new cancer therapeutic to improve outcomes for patients with both lung cancer and melanoma. I am grateful that I am who I am, that I am precisely where I am supposed to be at this moment in time. We all have bumps along the way — both peaks and troughs — but gratitude is about knowing that they all lead somewhere that is difficult to regret. We need to accept that gratitude doesn’t always have to be about something beyond yourself.  

The post The Pink Magnolia in the Branford Courtyard appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Your whispering is more frustrating than straight-up talking; The “s”s and “t”s are worse than a buzzing mosquito in my ear. I’d almost prefer the bug: It bites, and then it’s done, itchy, but bearable. But with your chatter, I can never tell what you’re talking about. I only know that it’s annoying as hell. You’re a mosquito that never gets what it wants, save for the designation of Public Nuisance No. 1. It’s perhaps even more annoying that I catch only snippets of words or half-phrases, scrambling the already dense lines of my reading: “essentially, the figure-to-space relationship is no different from the one that had been in use in the fifteenth century where foreground figures are kept completely disconnected from the infinite space behind them.” I hear figures in my foreground, and I am not happy about it. 

Is it just me, or are libraries getting louder and louder? Before spring break, I was in Starr Reading Room, which I thought was supposed to be silent. Let me set the scene: 

A pair of first-years slide a chair over and have a full-on chat right next to me, their laptops abandoned as they gossip, the glints in their eyes borderline maniacal. It’s midterm season; I feel obliged to give them the side-eye. Please be quiet. I am trying to read for an art history course. Chiaroscuro. Modeling shadow. Impasto. Please, for the love of God, be quiet. 

I put in my AirPods. White noise. Relaxing rain sounds. Train horn, two hours, no ads. Still. “So, if I book the Uber today, it’s more expensive, but at least then we’ll know we have one.” “I know, it’s so expensive, but I mean, we have to get to the airport somehow?” 

I myself have no idea how I am getting to the airport for spring break. I am now upset for several reasons. I add a line to my already too-long to-do list, then turn to them. I’ve been known to occasionally say “hi, how are you” in a library — I won’t pretend this essay isn’t at least partially hypocritical — but my present situation is simply absurd. I feel like I’m being slightly dramatic, but they are making my life harder in just one too many ways. 

“I’m sorry, but even with headphones in, I can hear you. It’s a library – please.” 

They look affronted, as if I’ve just committed sacrilege on the grave of their childhood cat. We make eye contact. I’m not messing around, but they seem to think their affronted look will absolve them of any guilt. Not today. If I don’t read about Rembrandt now, it isn’t getting done. I’m in the trenches. I am actively procrastinating the work I don’t want to do by going for the low-hanging fruit instead, tackling the work that truthfully doesn’t matter until finals. Can you tell I’m stressed? Now is not the time nor the place: go outside, in the street; go walk laps around the cemetery and jabber for all I care — ah, the things I would do for peace! 

At least once per library visit, I am startled out of my academic stupor by the frenetic twittering of various library-goers, and I must say, the frequency is alarming. Are people simply oblivious to a long-standing social norm, or is that norm now obsolete, and it’s me that hasn’t caught on? Is the expectation that I should turn on “Train sounds, two hours, no ads” to do my reading? Am I too beholden to the aesthetic standard of dark academia, dreaming of a shadowy silence that simply doesn’t exist in real life? If anyone has answers, let’s get a meal sometime. My cortisol suffers, I struggle, and all those involved are worse for the wear. 

The girl who brought her chair over returns it to its original home. Ah, finally. I can turn off the train horn. My AirPods are nearly dead as she comes back to retrieve her belongings, leaving an aside: “Just so you know, we should take a shuttle.” Her “quieter” whisper is somehow louder, and I feel a distinct sort of antique rage, a yearning for years where libraries were, presumably, more silent than they are now. The other girl returns to her computer. Finally, it is time for me to spend time with my dear van Rijn. His shadowy self-portrait and peachy ear greet me, and I’m not sure which is a better fate: the narcissism of this odd master of the Dutch Golden Age or that of my neighbors.

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It’s been just over two years since that day in October. I frequently reference time in the articles I write: I love the here’s, the nows, the then’s. I’m forever looking for a narrative, a way to piece together experiences that are so far removed from anything I could have dreamed of in high school — and removed from even what I dream of today. I craved belonging, yet here, almost two years in, I find myself digging for traces of otherness, of knowing a little bit less about what happens inside these walls. Yale has shown me the way the world works, in more ways than one. 

When I was flying back from Seattle over the most recent winter break, I sat next to a middle-aged man, somewhat balding, with coke-bottle glasses on the plane. I glanced over towards the window from the aisle seat and caught a glimpse of his extra-large text message: “yeah, full flight. A lot of college students are heading back, I think.” I was wearing my Yale crewneck, and though I want to make the argument that it was simply the bulkiest piece of clothing I was carting back to school and that I wanted the extra luggage space, that would be a lie. The sweatshirt screamed: “I go to Yale. I’m proud of it. And I don’t shop at H&M. Ask me where I go to school. I dare you.” 

I landed at Logan Airport in a swarm of college students, the vast majority of them (obviously) attending school in the greater Boston area. Heading towards baggage claim, I passed a group of girls who were on my flight gossiping about another girl, saying she “gave the same energy” as a student from this all-girls Catholic school near where I grew up. The “energy” they described didn’t seem good, but I knew the type, and, somewhat shamefully, fully identified with their frustration. They moved on to jabber about spring break. I looked for my bag.

I caught a random Uber to the Boston South train station with another Yale student. He had just graduated, and I didn’t know him, but he had gone to a large public high school near me that was not particularly known for sending kids to the Ivy League. It turns out he shared my love of art history, and was thinking about continuing onwards with grad school in the discipline. We chatted about our favorite art history professors and the work he had done at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry in high school. Back then I still thought I wanted to major in comparative literature. 

Somehow, the “Yale bubble” that used to be confined to Lake Place and Orange Street has only grown exponentially. It is harder and harder to remember — and value — that what is normal here really isn’t normal nearly everywhere else. I used to think that “elitism” was about being of a certain economic class, traveling freely around the world or fraternizing at glitzy events. But “elitism,” as I’ve come to realize, is also the knowledge that the door will usually open in your name, in whatever you choose to do. It may not stay wide open, mark you, but the odds are it will always be ajar. 

I miss my grandmother welcoming me at the door of her townhouse. She lives alone. We talk less often now than I’d like to, but when we do, I get updates on her friends, on the air plants she soaks once a week, and on her frustration at the multiplying ads in “Architectural Digest” and “Elle.” 

Yale changed me, yes; however, it has changed how others see me even more. But not my grandmother. She always opens the door and doesn’t expect me to live up to anyone’s name. 

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Five years ago, I wrote that “change needs to be turned in not tomorrow, but today.”

But now – following the five-year anniversary of the mass shooting enabled by nonexistent assault weapons laws that took seventeen fourteen-year-olds who would be sophomores in university, just as myself, as you, as your peers, and the students you teach – three students at Michigan State University are dead. They are Arielle Anderson, a pre-med student who wanted to be a surgeon, Brian Fraser, president of Michigan State’s Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and Alexandria Vernier, the multi-sport athlete described by her high school superintendent as “an amazing girl that doesn’t come around that often.”  I spend my school night not reading for my art history class, nor writing a lighthearted piece for the News’ WKND section, but about the same anger I wrote about five years ago, now a chilling terror that begets no descriptors. Arielle was 19, Brian and Alexandria 20. Three more peers – one campus reels, while others move on, mourning their own profound losses. 

I have written about “shell-shock putting me on my knees.” I have written that my education on gun control in America in the years following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting “has been enough,” and that February 14th, 2018 was the day my childhood ended and adulthood began. I have written that “all I feel is the bone-rattling panic that comes when someone’s youth is crumpled between the bony palms of a scary world.” I have walked out of class in protest, but now I am not just afraid to walk alone at night. I have no emotions left.

Last year, it was a bomb threat at Yale and three other Ivy League campuses. This year, it was armed police storming Bingham Hall in the middle of the night. It is the weekly Yale Alerts and assaults of students just steps from dorm room entrances. It is paintball shooters and pellet guns and automatic weapons that are still legal to buy in much of the United States. 

I have written to my family from a place they have sent me to learn about the world, reassuring them that the world has not hurt me. This time.  

Today, I write that I cannot imagine a walk to class in which I am not afraid. 

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