1. Light blue and pink 2. My uncle and his first wife
3. John Hay and John D. Rockefeller
4. Me and a shot of Tito’s
5. Janet and Brad from The Rocky Horror Picture Show
6.
7. CP*x and Husband, esq.
8. Rhode Island and Massachusetts
9. Green and Red M&M
10. Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group
Dear Readers,
There’s just no way around it: Daylight Savings Time has got me fucked up. It seems as if one second, my friends and I were still spending afternoons basking on the Main Green, leaves twirling slowly through the air on a gentle breeze—and the next, it was getting dark at 4:00 p.m. I wasn’t prepared for the new wintry chill that settled across campus overnight, nor for the wind to personally attack my hair every time I walk through Sciences Park. Most of all, I wasn’t prepared for the fact that now I can stroll into classes or meetings with the sun shining merrily overhead, and exit into a wall of pitch-black darkness.
I think it’s weird, really. The fact that we can all perceive this abstract, omnipresent concept we call time in the exact same way, year by year, day by day. And the fact that, simultaneously, the way that we experience the passage of time morphs and shifts, as easy and powerful as breathing. The hours drag, the months fly by. With one mutual agreement that we call Daylight Savings Time, we can actually change the clocks. The speeds at which we live. Isn’t that wild?
This week, our writers, too, are thinking about time: its persistence and its fluidity. In Lifestyle, Maria considers the way past identities play into future ones. In Narrative, Samaira thinks
about personal and social changes that have occurred since the start of college, and Danielle reflects on storytelling and intergenerational relationships throughout her family. Ishan writes about non-visual forms of media in Arts and Culture, while Ina investigates the histories of how students have gotten the ick in post-pourri. Coco shares a crossword themed around forces that work in tandem—and to top it off, you can catch me in Feature mulling the possibilities of alternative lives (and if the RIPTA ever comes on time).
It’s easy to get caught up in the earliness with which the sun slides behind the horizon nowadays, or in the seemingly-endless mountains of work that keep piling up (has it really been midterm season for three weeks now?).
It’s far harder to let yourself surrender to the ripples and eddies of a clock that never seems to stop ticking. But in the midst of my 19th Daylight Savings, and as I head into my second New England winter, I think I’m learning that the only choice is to surrender: to cling a little tighter to the watery morning sunlight in the day, and to embrace the chilly dusk as that comes too. Time moves whether or not we want it to—so take a deep breath, and move with her. And, of course, bring this week’s edition of post- with you.
Zipping up my puffer jacket,
Michelle Bi post-pourri Managing Editor
by Michelle bi
Illustration by Lila vianna @jademademoon_art
In another life, I never moved away from Illinois. I spend summers laying out picnic blankets in the fenceless backyard that we share with eight of our neighbors. We drink iced tea out of plastic cups and run after fireflies, watching the yellow lights weave through our fingers.
Maybe I’d have stayed best friends with P, gone on lunch runs and midnight drives together, texted under the desks in AP Biology. Maybe G could have been my first kiss, with eyes the color of sky before storm, long blonde curls I’d thread my hands through in the back seat after prom. I’d be adept on my old bike. I’d finally learn to fish off of that bridge.
I don’t think I would have come to Brown, in that life. I wouldn’t have attended the California summer program in high school that sparked my love for writing. Instead I might have studied civil engineering, or music composition, or bioinformatics. I’d have other friends. My laugh would ring differently. I wouldn’t be me anymore, or at all. I wouldn’t be writing this now.
I spend a lot of time in this life thinking about other ones. I imagine all my possible futures trailing off like splitting branches on an old oak tree, every leaf a different shade of red. Things were slower when I was a kid, when adult responsibilities didn’t loom on the horizon. Now, life is about doing the most, the best, the fastest— social life, internships, classes, extracurriculars, everything that constitutes college and beyond. I clamber up the tree toward a thousand formless futures, clawing for the best one, the right one. I spend my days racing someone whose name I don’t know. She looks a lot like me.
March 22, 2025
10:38 a.m.
Train 87 is currently experiencing a delay in Route 128 due to issues with the engine. Our crew and mechanical team are currently troubleshooting the issue at hand.
12:13 p.m.
Due to ongoing issues with the current engine, a replacement engine has been sourced and is currently en route to Train 87’s location.
1:56 p.m.
Train 87 has been DELAYED. Departure estimates are subject to change. Don’t want to wait around? You can review your options and rebook travel by clicking…
My friends like to tease me that I am transportation cursed. In the past two years, I’ve experienced four train delays of over an hour, five airplane delays of the same length, two complete flight cancellations, one Zipcar catastrophe involving a combination lock and a $100 loss
from my bank account (the story has to be told in person; it’s a doozy), and a truly immeasurable number of RIPTA fiascos.
I don’t say this to curry any kind of sympathy. I only ever bring it up to make my friends laugh. But the pattern has continued for so long and at such a consistent pace that, against my better wishes, I’m starting to believe there may be a kernel of truth to the “curse” after all. Is there really some higher power out there conspiring against me every time I decide to cross state lines? Is this the universe’s way of telling me to give up and settle, before I’ve even hit two decades of living? ❯❯❯❯
May 16, 2025
2:07 p.m.
SWA Flight 4124 on May 16 from BNA is canceled and we are working to rebook you. 2:11 p.m.
You’ve been rebooked to LAX on SWA Flight 3239 departing May 16 from BNA at 6:50 p.m., connecting to SWA Flight 2353 departing PHX at 10:05 p.m. on May 16.
At the conclusion of my first year, I’m meant to fly home, from T.F. Green to Nashville to LA. Instead, I check my phone once I land in Tennessee to see that the second leg of my trip has been unceremoniously cancelled. I flurry to rebook my flight—I’m wellpracticed at this point—and I’m not sure if it’s me or the Southwest system that succeeds first, but one of us does. I’ve added an extra stop in Phoenix to my journey, but at least I’m going home.
At least I’m going home. myself for the first hour, and in the beginning, it’s easy to stay energetic. I walk the terminal from end to end. I peruse cheesy romance books and cheesier tourist gear. I listen through an Omar Apollo album.
checked bag doesn’t show up at baggage claim. Southwest representatives tell me that it wound up in Louisiana, that they’ll mail it back when they track it down. My dad drives me home with only half of my closet. My curse is just showing off now.
“Through the oculus of the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station, light falls for a hundred feet. A shock, a god, a pillar of light, like that of the Pantheon if the Pantheon had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, surly young workers at the Greyhound desk, & an escalator rising to its height— just like it, that light. A patent for an early escalator called it an improvement
Then I get antsy, so I sit on the floor by my gate and try to do work. I’m getting too tired to think. I walk the terminal again in search of food, but honestly I just want In-N-Out. I miss home. Then I think of Brown. I already miss my Brown friends too. That doesn’t seem fair. It’s only been half a day.
I wait out the rest of my layover in increasing discomfort; I fidget and pace for what feels like a decade but is really under three hours. Every seat I find is too scratchy, every corner too loud, too dirty. I want to be on the move, to be doing something, en route to home or elsewhere, anywhere but here.
The journey from Providence to California was supposed to take 10 hours. In the end, it takes 16, and to top it all off, I get my period on the way to Phoenix and bleed through my underwear. When I finally land at LAX, my last
surely, how I’m standing still & still, somehow, going up & up & up.”
– Mairead Small Staid, “An Improvement in Stairs”
In another life, everything would be exactly the same as this one, except every single mode of transportation I planned on would be perfectly on time. The RIPTA would never sail past me three minutes early while I waved my hands ineffectually at the bus stop. The trains to Boston and New York would always leave as scheduled. The planes would take off on time.
This dimension would surely be far from the very best one, but my life would be easier, in some small but concrete ways. I wouldn’t balk at the idea of traveling, or feel my heart rate rise with anxiety at every extra minute of delay. I
read somewhere that some species of sharks have to be swimming constantly, or else they drown. I could be a shark. I could never slow down.
June 14, 2025
Phone call to Mom – 8 minutes (ended) 12:14 p.m.
He’s calling Triple A He doesn’t have his insurance with him I got his license I’m sorry ��
Phone call to Mom – 6 minutes (ended) 12:22 p.m.
Michelle, get pictures of his car too Front and back
“Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.”
— Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras”
I think the thing that scares me most— more than intimacy, more than loneliness—is stagnancy. A loss of agency. For me, those come hand in hand: To question yourself is to still. To be still is to have lost your way. Being stranded in the airport, pacing like a caged wildcat, stuck in limbo and uncertainty, powerless. Being 19 and climbing the tree, racing for the right decisions, the only right decision.
down a side road past the backed-up freeway. I am cruising—and then. And then the scream of metal on metal. The sound of glass shattering. I’ve never heard that before, I think dimly. Then the lurch of motion across the other lane, four tires squealing across asphalt. My friend screaming. I’ve never heard that before.
When we skid to a rest in the sand on the other side of the road, my hands are white-knuckled around the wheel. I haven’t let go. We’ve been rear-ended; I step out into billowing dust to find both back lights smashed, the trunk door caved in so that you can see last week’s grocery bags inside, the bumper hanging off the right side entirely, dragging limp into the dirt. The back doors won’t open. The windshield is pulverized. I hadn’t even let go.
I watch my futures slip between my fingertips. All my other lives play out in blinding color when I close my eyes. And what if I make the wrong choices? What if I waste the only thing that has ever truly belonged to me?
In another life, maybe another car was driving down that side road at the same time that my car was spinning spinning spinning into the other lane, and their hood thundered into my door; or maybe I was rear-ended just a little bit harder, faster—all of which is to say that in another life, I am no longer alive.
I think a lot about what that would be like. Surely, I wouldn’t have the swish of my feet through the scarlet leaves littering the Main Green, or the sensation of cold rain trickling into my shirt, down each of my ribs like a xylophone. Surely I wouldn’t have the laughs of my friends, all piled onto the same twin XL bed, each with their own key and melody.
I wonder who’d miss me. I wonder who wouldn’t. Mostly though, I wonder if I’d be capable of missing anything—if some nebulous part of my spirit would return to the breaking seafoam on the beach, or the rangy coyotes that lope through the chaparral of my hometown. If I’d get to watch my friends graduate and my sister grow up, peering from a second realm folded between the wrinkles in ours like origami. If I’d see every timeline drop golden from that old gnarling oak. If I’d finally know it all.
Or maybe whatever constitutes myself would have been snuffed out entirely instead. I’d be here and then gone. Nineteen years vanished in the flash of a blinker. Something about almost dying. Something that makes you want to cling tight to this life again.
A few days after I get home for the summer, my missing suitcase turns up on my doorstep, a tag that reads “NEW ORLEANS AIRPORT”
hanging from its handle. Everything I lost is accounted for inside.
I spend my break in California with a gnawing worry deep in my stomach—that my hometown no longer fits inside me the way that it used to. The teal walls of my bedroom are plastered with pictures of people I don’t know anymore, calendars with “Senior Week!” circled in yellow highlighter, the gaping holes in between indicating the posters that I deemed adult enough to move with me to college. When I curl up on my queen-size mattress, I feel like a little kid. When I walk to the library or my friends’ houses, I feel indescribably old, the streetlamps flickering around my head, the roads all at once unfamiliar and choking.
But what I am learning is that my 19-yearold self is growing around the 18-year-old one, just as she did around the 17-year-old, and all the way back to the little girl who dangled fishing rods taller than her into the river and scrambled after fireflies, in the same way that rings on a tree grow around themselves. There is always time to live slow and soft, to make the wrong choices. California and Rhode Island and the past and the futures are contained within me. Everything I have ever lost is still accounted for.
“I count my time in dog years
Swimming in sevens, slow dancing in seconds Oh, and I’m the one that loves you Oh, and I’m the one that loves you” — Maggie Rogers, “Dog Years”
Before the windshield exploding, before the Nashville airport, even before I swear off Zipcar, there is Montréal—or more accurately, the drive home from it.
My mom has spent the entire week leading up to spring break fretting about the forecasted blizzards. She is concerned about me and my friends’ driving abilities—she is a mother, after all. What if the road gets too icy? she asks me, her voice tinny on the phone. What if you get caught in the storm?
We’ll be fine, I laugh.
And truly, her worries don’t sound real until I find myself on the third driving shift back from Canada, following a one-lane mountain road through somewhere in Vermont. The clouds that have spent hours gathering at the horizon have burst. Snow falls thickly in a blanket over the road, as soft and gentle as heartbreak. I cannot see more than three feet in front me.
Initially I want to panic. I have no indication of where I am going beside my friend’s GPS, blinking from the dashboard, but he’s sound asleep in the passenger seat and I know he needs the rest. I have never driven in conditions worse than light-to-medium rain. We are caught in the storm.
I adjust the rearview mirror to see my other three friends also asleep in the backseat, their heads nestled against each other’s shoulders and collarbones. The sight relaxes my hands, unclenching from the steering wheel, and I realize that they trust me to bring all of us back in one piece. More importantly, I find that I trust myself too, now—not completely, but at least a little more, and that will have to do.
So I slow the car to a crawl. In the end it is very simple—I know there is a path home; I know I can find the way there. I flick the high beams on.
on speaking
by danielle li
Illustrated by Ariana R. Jimenez @arican.draw
Baba talks like he will never stop again.
The words leave his lips through the too-wide gap between his front teeth, like the whistling February air that always sweeps through the torn window screens and leaves the inside of our house the same temperature as the outside. Baba tells me to close my eyes and imagine I’m lounging on a warm beach, perhaps Clearwater or Coronado, and pretend the cold away.
I ask Ma why he can never help but finish a story, and she just shakes her head in exasperation: The words will bottle up inside him and rattle like a bell.
Once I watched the butcher beat a fish to death at the Asian supermarket. It was flailing the way I imagine a frog’s torn limb would, still shuddering, twitching, not knowing it was already dead.
That night I turn away, tight-lipped, from the steaming bao buns Ma places in front of me. I’d like to imagine that my stomach is roiling from the memory of slaughter, but more likely it rumbles at the smell of braised pork belly, shiitake, crumbled tofu, and chives that get stuck in the back of our teeth, needing to be coaxed out with a toothpick.
Baba’s chapped lips quirk at the corners,
and I already know that the words are about to stream out of him like the perpetual trickle of water from our downstairs faucet, leaky and dejected, but not yet broken enough to be fixed.
When I was young
我小的时候 he always begins
we ate bao buns on New Year’s. We would eat sunflower seeds and chip our teeth from cracking them open. We ate peanuts and sweet syrup on a stick and called it candy.
He bares his teeth, and I can see the ridges where the sunflowers wore them down, like little anthills on stained yellow enamel.
We tried to stay awake as long as possible, as if the sun would never come up again. And the first morning after we ate bao buns again. On the second day, we also ate bao buns. And we did on the fourth and fifth days, too.
I never ask him what happened on the third day. Baba forgets to eat as he talks and his eyes glow yellow like a hawk’s under the waning kitchen lights. He twirls bamboo chopsticks between his fingers and traces shapes into the grain of the table. Perhaps, if he had been an artist like his father was, they could have been beautiful.
We ate so many bao buns that they would
come right back up. Your grandmother’s cooking was awful. He pauses to think. And they were always vegetable filling. It was the Li family tradition to eat vegetable bao buns on New Year’s day.
Ma likes to plate our dinners obsessively, forbidding us to eat until she forms neat rows and columns. We watch, pretending that the spirals of radish and salt-boiled bok choy won’t immediately be desecrated by our chopsticks.
The further along the bamboo you hold your chopsticks, the farther you will end up from home when you grow old, my mother warns me. So I slide my fingers down the bamboo even when it makes it harder to pick at the blush-pink radish ribbons. She wipes the edges of the plate of mapo tofu and afterwards, uses the napkin that comes away red to wash the dishes.
Each bite of food you leave on your plate is a mountain that you will have to eat in the afterlife, she warns us, and I exchange a glance with Baba. So I bite into the bao bun. I can’t pretend that it isn’t one of the best things I have eaten.
Baba never lets me watch TV lying down. You’ll lose your vision and go blind, he says. It is just another one of his sayings. He likes chengyu
成语, Chinese idioms the most.
乱七八糟 (luàn qī bā zāo), he shakes his head in mock displeasure at my trash can, overflowing with stubs of papers, empty Crunch wrappers, and the butts of pencils too short to reach the blade in the sharpener. Without asking, he silently empties the trash can. He replaces the plastic bag with a new one.
He watches the 2 a.m. bruises that hang below my eyes and frowns, 废寝忘食, “forget to eat, forget to sleep.” He brings a plate of mangoes to my door, sliced in tic-tac-toe. I tell him I like blueberries better, but my fingers peel the cubes from the mangoes’ skin, and juice stains my pants in plaid stripes of yellow. In the morning, there are three boxes of blueberries stacked in the refrigerator.
The fifteenth day of New Year is special, he tells me. That day your grandfather would make lanterns. He would draw Pigsy and Monkey from 西游记 (xī yóu jì) and place the candle inside. The smoke would push the drawing and the figures would move. The other kids’ lanterns could only light up, but the ones your grandfather made were special.
I hear the crooning of the mourning dove. I imagine closing my eyes to the burning of candles. I imagine Pigsy dancing in circles on a ballet
stage. I imagine my grandfather’s hands, ones I have never seen, making special lanterns till morning comes.
The day my grandmother died, I watched Baba’s bowed shadow from the end of the hallway. I saw him crumple under the news like a paper airplane, holding the receiver to his ear, his goodbye sent seven thousand miles too late. I pretended not to notice the sheen in his eyes, and he pretended that it was not there. He blinked and it was gone.
Cows know when they are going to die, he tells me. Our family owned a cow, and when I led her to her death, she was crying. I laugh and tell him that cows can’t cry.
We argue, and even the creaking floorboards cower, too afraid to make noise beneath our fury. His face twists like a storm and I am filled with such hatred that I believe if I pierced my wrists, my blood would run black.
White-eared wolf, my mother howls at me somewhere beyond the doorframe, hands patchy white and dripping with clumps of unkneaded dough. Ungrateful
Baba is silent when he is angry. My vision tunnels so that his face shrinks and then balloons so comically large that I laugh, forgetting for a moment I’m supposed to be furious. He rips the glasses from my face and I stumble like a blinded mouse through the house and out the back. When my shoe jams in the door, I tear another hole in the mesh screen. Let the mosquitos bite him at night, I pray.
In the morning we pretend that nothing has happened. We are good at this, pretending.
You are the banana children, my father tells me.
You have the hair of a black waterfall and they will pull their eyes into slits and laugh at
you. Don’t be upset. My heart flutters. “But I am American,” I protest.
My father is afraid of new cities. He tells me that he feels lost and unfamiliar, like he has been pulled into a dream where no one understands his tongue and the world is written in what he cannot read. I can’t pity him, this man who has read me stories and eaten the tomatoes I picked off my plate and placed onto his.
My tongue also twists into sharp sounds—a quick, light t that is imperceptible to the ear, think the flap t of “water” (wader) or the glottal stop of “forgotten” (forgo-n). My father pronounces each syllable carefully, painfully, as if afraid they will go unheard. Each comes out with a puff and the clack of teeth, like the sharp t of “pretending.” I listen to him, and the vowel pacing rises from the back of the throat like bile; it comes out too fast, too sloppy.
I am the banana child, and I spill from my father’s tongue the way Dionysus tore himself from Zeus’s thigh and Athena sprang from his gnarled skull.
I see my father’s hair as the color of static on old TVs and I press on the bulging veins of his hands as if I could force them to stitch back together with his skin. Sometimes, in my dreams, I pretend that I speak as he speaks, the words so dense that they form a canopy of fig trees that reaches through my bedroom windows. Afterward, in the morning, there is the tang of metal that sinks into my gums, my tongue, and I remember nothing.
making and witnessing nonvisual media
by ishan khurana
Illustrated by Orla Maxwell @eight_of_ponds
Consider, for a second, the value of forcible constraint: the weight of the absent e in George Perec’s lipogram A Void, or the mysterious vividness of the paper cutouts Henri Matisse made when illness prevented him from painting. Forcible constraint may not be pleasant, but the perspectives it encourages are otherwise unreachable.
For example, a concussion in May left me, until quite recently, with several deficiencies of the eye. Unable to read or use screens without difficulty, it was a struggle to learn how to “repercieve”—to shift away from my primary means of grounding myself in this world. At the same time, I am fascinated by the opportunity I’ve had to picture without seeing, to visualize without my vision, and to lean into the spaces that have opened up when others have closed.
While not exactly an enjoyable situation, novelty creates beauty in its own way, and there are several ways to engage with it.
In my case, the constraint I was given was darkness. And so, having been dealt my cards, I began to play and to explore. Here are some ways to consume and produce media that don’t rely on the eyes.
1.
Perhaps the most obvious, podcasts have become a go-to; I’ve explored everything from science Q&As to fantasy football analysis with fascination. Interaction may be scarce in isolation, but this medium allows you to enter the headspace of conversation—an extrovert’s fuel or an introvert’s fantasy. Given the reliability of their release, podcasts are a schedulable break from thought, and having regular entertainment to look forward to is a relief, a blessing.
(Examples: Dear Hank and John, The Fantasy Footballers, The Penguin Podcast)
2. Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text
Of course, there is much you do that does not revolve around entertainment. There are still essays to turn in, emails and messages to send, and questions to be answered. For assignments that involve writing, I recommend using speech-to-text tools such as voice typing on Google Docs; though some proofreading may be necessary, any way to get thoughts onto the page is effective enough. A screen reader, in turn, can be used to navigate written language, bringing the text to robotic life, or even to complete other class assignments, such as readings.
To engage with your phone, make use of your favorite digital assistant wherever possible if you’re trying to avoid screentime, or even if you’re just multitasking. They’ll generously read your notifications, answer texts and emails, make calls, check the weather, and do more than I could’ve possibly known.
(Examples: NVDA, Apple’s VoiceOver, the Notes app)
3. Voice Notes
The desire for artistic expression does not stop when your eyes are inhibited, and so, consider voice notes as an alternative method for capturing thoughts. While the aforementioned speech-to-text and text-tospeech work well enough for analytical and assignment purposes, they don’t do creativity the same justice. It seems, after all, that these tools don’t share my love for (or understanding of) excessive use of the em dash, semicolon, and ellipses…
If you’re a writer, voice notes offer a space to capture and hold onto the emotion of your words and the layers of your thoughts, or, if you’re stuck, a space to rant and brainstorm. It’s useful to listen back to old moments, the same way you might re-read past journal entries or other work.
If you’re a musician, I imagine you’ve grown used to voice memos, but they continue to be useful. Record your voice, instrument, and ideas, saving them, perhaps, for a day when you have more energy.
If you’re a visual artist and unable to engage with your work, consider voice notes to be your sketch-before-the-sketch, an opportunity to plan out a piece, however possible. Visualize what you can and say it, capturing detail for now with diction rather than with color.
(Examples: Voice Memos, Easy Voice Recorder)
As rare as it may be nowadays to tune into FM radio when not in the car, there is a remarkable flexibility to the radio, a currently underrated method of media consumption. While Spotify may give you the option to choose your music, radio—also available on your phone—offers a roulette of stations, a rare variety which brings more excitement and meaning to the songs you love. The banter of a DJ, or the assorted conversations of other radio hosts, is valuable now; any mention of current events is a tether to reality, a reminder of the outside world and the role you play in it. In addition to music, explore other stations such as news, comedy, sports, and more to extend your tether. Reminders of the passage of time in the real world are your guidance through difficulty—a reminder that, with time, things heal.
And it’s always nice to know more about the world.
(Examples: Hits 1, NPR’s Fresh Air, Laugh Out Loud)
Lastly, if/when you feel limited by yourself, do not stop. If you are ill or injured, trust yourself to recover, and in general, make use of not just tools, but also situations. While knowing that for some time the world will be what it will be, take action; push out against the walls that enclose you. Carve scripture into and sculpture out of this concrete, clawing yourself out of this prison and leaving a trail of unimaginable beauty as you escape into relief.
And take some deep breaths. It helps.
(Honorable Mentions: Audiobooks, Lecture Recordings, Audio Texting, Ambient Noise)
It’s funny to think how much the passage of time can change our relationships to ideas, hobbies and beliefs. This is something I’ve been grappling with lately: How much of our present selves are defined by our past identities?
It is obvious that much has changed in the year and a half I’ve been in college. I think about the way my high school self would have reacted to everything going on in my present life: how I’ve diverged, the habits I’ve adopted and fallen out of, and the people I’ve met that have shaped me into a different person. I think about the texts in English literature and philosophy—my intended concentrations—that I’ve absorbed, and the beliefs I’ve adopted as a result. What makes me different from who I was before coming to Brown? Should I be concerned about the extent to which I have changed, or that I haven’t changed enough?
College gives you a certain amount of freedom that is both a blessing and a curse. Suddenly, you are responsible for all of your actions, and structure is replaced by uncertainty and spontaneity. It is funny to think about how my high school self, addicted to watching college day-in-the-life and living alone vlogs, could only dream of these moments. My somewhat-monotonous high school life, spent mostly in the same suburban neighborhood, pales in comparison to the guarantee of neartotal independence and freedom that college in a completely new environment has given me.
As with most unfamiliar and exciting things, I soon realized that independence comes with far more liabilities than expected. For chronic overthinkers, freedom and independence can mean thinking and rethinking every decision, whether as big as choosing the right classes to take that semester or as small as deciding what specific time to do laundry on the weekend so as not to disrupt the rest of the day. Am I taking full advantage of every opportunity available here? If I had made a different choice that day, or used a different phrase while talking to that one person, how would it have affected the trajectory of the rest of my college life? As the days pass and weeks blur, I sometimes wonder if my choices are valid, or if I’ll cringe looking back on them, as I so often do. Perhaps the journey of making wrong decisions is supposed to teach me to do better in the future.
Perhaps all the uncertainty of college can be boiled down to that period of indecisiveness I had last summer, staying in a sublet with my friends and being responsible for cooking my own meals for the first time—where an hour of scrolling through “easy meal recipes” on TikTok and an additional hour of trying not to burn down the kitchen led to a batch of overcooked rice and rubbery eggs. Maybe I should take every decision I make with a grain of salt, as one that most likely won’t have an impact on the near future or even the next 10 years, as I somehow naturally assumed. Maybe my identity is determined by something other than the dozens of mistakes and wrong choices I seem to make daily.
In high school, identity was formed from passions, but passions had the habit of slipping away when designated as work or obligation; trial and error with periods of packed schedules and nearly-inevitable bouts of burnout proved this time and again. As the number of “AP”s preceding the names of the classes on my high school transcript increased with each semester, I found myself reduced to someone motivated solely by doing the bare minimum, unable to muster the strength or energy to enjoy the activities I worked so hard toward improving, including competitive classical piano. By the end of senior year, not even my beloved “piano :)” playlist on Spotify or the videos of Seong-Jin Cho’s performances I’d rewatched on YouTube probably hundreds of times seemed able to revive this initial spirit; my piano books sullenly accrued dust on their bench.
Upon reaching college, where spontaneity is encouraged and deadlines only seem real when you’re face-to-face with them, uncertainty becomes an inevitable part of the human condition. Yet it’s from this uncertainty that passions arise, whether previously unfamiliar or reborn out of old, worn interests. As I let go of preconceived notions of obligations and let myself do whatever I want— embodying the spirit of the Open Curriculum, some would say—a sense of genuine interest returns, one that I seemed to have lost for a while. Who knew that a break from the stressful atmosphere of competitive classical piano for a year would result in a completely new interest, even fondness for the art, resulting in almost weekly trips to Steinert at midnight? Would my high school self—struggling through enriched biology and wondering what the purpose of life was—believe that I’d be discussing Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason every Monday and Wednesday in college?
Perhaps I should view myself as the sleepdeprived struggling student in suburban Minnesota dreaming of the day I’d move to a different environment—now in said different environment. Perhaps I should view myself as having left that identity behind, with my present identity being exactly what that high schooler imagined. Or maybe it would be better to try to focus more on the present moment: Maybe all of the miniscule decisions I make in a day really do compose my self-identity (perhaps I should view myself as the chronic bad free-day scheduler, where I somehow manage to attempt to do laundry each Saturday at the same time every other individual in my dorm building does).
When I look back on this article in the next few years, I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll find nearly all of these questions still unanswered, as usually is the natural state of those who live in the future, or at least in apprehension of it. Or maybe with time, I’ll grow to enjoy this uncertainty, one that I’ll accept as an inevitable part of my experience in this life.
tell me a story of a time you got the ick
by Ina ma | Illustrated by Cayden Garrett @garrartt
1. “When they’re rude to waiters. Or waitresses. Or wait-theys.”
2. “When people chew with their mouth open.”
3. “No one has ever hit on me, so.”
4. “He was really short, but I didn’t mind it. He started going on this huge rant about how he hates being short and is insecure about it. And I realized he had a lot of pent-up emotion. This guy hates himself. And I was like, ‘Maybe not.’”
5. “I watched a K-pop idol I liked do something stupid.”
6. “Someone wasn't organizing [politically] in a way that was meaningful enough, then I got the ick. That’s why I broke up with my previous girlfriend.”
7. “It’s not a common emotion for me.” “I feel like it totally is.”
8. “When somebody was bad at kissing. They tried to make out with me and there was too much spit involved. They were like, ‘This is good.’”
9. “There was this girl who was performing in [performance group] and she was just, like, the hottest girl I’ve ever seen in my entire life and gave me crazy gender envy. The hottest, coolest, lots of gender envy, queer girl. So, I text her after the performance, like, ‘you were so cool the performance was so cool, I’d love to take you out sometime,’ and she was like ‘ahh I have finals, I’m busy, but you should totally join [performance group] next semester,’ and I’m like, ‘ahh yeah yeah I’ll probably join [performance group], it seems really cool and I’ll get to talk to this girl.’ Summer comes, I’m thinking about girl, not thinking about girl. I come back to school and join [performance group]. And I’m like expecting, ‘oh my gosh, I’m going to be in the presence of this very hot, very mysterious girl who I think is so hot,’ whatever.
So. You know when someone’s voice doesn’t match their appearance? She started
talking and moving.
It just feels like she’s a chronically online high-schooler, like I was just expecting such a hot and mysterious personality because her whole appearance was this queer-lesbian-hotmysterious girl. When she started talking, it was this very innocent, chronically online high schooler. The voice, the personality, does not match the appearance at all. Actually, this is really incongruent with my idea of her. She’s so attractive to me when she’s still, like a photo. Whenever I see her move or talk, it’s like a completely different person from when it’s just a photo. Our autisms have low cosine similarity. It’s so bad because she’s like a siren. But then she talks.”
10. “One time I was TA-ing a course with a guy, and he let all our students climb up a super tall tree. He almost got fired for it, and all the kids almost got kicked out of the program. And I was like, ‘That was so stupid, that’s not safe.’ And this was a mental health program, where we weren’t supposed to let the teenagers out of our sight… the brain of a male only develops at the age of 26.”
11. “On 4/20, we were all high and we went to the Ivy Room to eat dinner. It was unfair of me because they were pretty high, but I was trying to show them the Virginia Department of Wildlife Falcon Camera I really like looking at, and they were utterly uninterested, and I was offended.”
12. “He didn’t use shampoo or conditioner, ever. He was a swimmer.”
13. “They started picking their nose.”
14. “I was at the autopsy place and [person of interest] locked me in the freezer with all the dead bodies. I would relate her to the smell of dead bodies.”
15. “He grew his hair out.”
coco kanders
Across Down 6 4 7 9 5
1. Marriage
6. Tubular pasta
7. Medical spiced soda involved in a merger, abbr.
8. Prefix that keeps an email chain alive
9. Propelled, as by a crew team
11. Snow day sliders
1. Elevated hairstyles
2. Nation nestled between China and India
3. Part of group
4. When drivers pause in unison
5. Can't do without
10. See 8-Across...and hit "Reply All" again
Thank you for reading
“‘Is my eyeliner even?’ she asked me anxiously. I looked back at her silhouette in the yellow dawn light, hands animated, eyes bright. I looked and all I could see was the little girl who had napped on my shoulder every car ride. I looked and looked and felt my heart quiver with sadness. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Yeah, it’s even.’ And with that, she looked satisfied.”
— Michelle Bi, “what we inherit”
“But when the time comes to make the cut, I never do. I have never trusted myself enough, which is to say, when things go wrong I don’t know how to forgive myself. It’s easier when my redemption relies on someone I love, and I don’t know if I’ve ever loved myself. I would rather be the one with my eyes closed. I would rather let someone else hold the blade.”
— Emily Tom, “triptych of bathroom haircuts” 11.15.23
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