Post- April 28, 2016

t s o p 8-

IL 2 APR

UME L O V

SUE 8 - IS

22

1

s i h nt

. . . e issu

, e s n e f e d i ess, self- imals sadn uffed an t s d an

2

upfront

contents

editor's note Dear Readers,

upfront features 3 • final farewells

Post- Seniors 4 • a congestion of the brain

Anne-Marie Kommers

lifestyle 5 • red beans and rice

Blake Piel 5 • speculative self-defense

Yamini Mandava 8 • home for the holidays

Melanie Abeygunawardana

arts & culture 6 • less than pennies a day

Mollie Forman 6 • face the future

Abby Muller 7 • the dorm room menagerie Lucia Iglesias

staff

Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Abby Muller Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin

Arts & Culture Editors Liz Studlick Mollie Forman Features Editors Lauren Sukin Halley McArn

Managing Editor of Lifestyle Cissy Yu

Lifestyle Editors Rebecca Ellis Claire Sapan Corinne Sejourne

Managing Editor of Online Amy Andrews

Creative Director Grace Yoon

I’d like to begin our last issue by wishing you all the best for this summer—and more immediately, luck in your finals and in all of your reading period endeavors. This issue is especially important for us because it is the last issue for many of us. Our managing editors for Online and Arts and Culture, Amy and Abby, are both graduating, as well as our section editors, Liz, Lauren, Mollie, and Corinne. In this last edition of Post- you’ll find (colorful) notes from all of our graduating editors, whom we will miss. This year’s Post- staff has enjoyed working with each other, working with the BDH, and working with our writers and illustrators to produce all of our issues. We hope to see you back at Brown next year!

Best,

Yidi

see you next year Please email alicia_devos@brown.edu.

Copy Chiefs Alicia DeVos Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Tushar Bhargava Katherine Chavez Loren Dowd

Rebecca Forman Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Gabrielle Hick Lucia Iglesias Anne-Marie Kommers Joshua Lu Ameer Malik Aubrey McDonough Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Spencer Roth-Rose Ryan Walsh Joshua Wartel Claribel Wu

Staff Illustrators Alice Cao Peter Herrara Jason Hu Beverly Johnson Jenice Kim Emma Margulies Michelle Ng Mary O’Connor Emily Reif Yoo Jin Shin

Cover Katie Cafaro

upfront

3

final farewells ... or whatever POST- SENIORS

Goodbye, Post-, I am a senior.

-LS All life ends equally in death.

-LS I feel like there isn’t much I can say that won’t read like the back of a graduation pamphlet (if that’s even a thing that exists.) Many of my best memories come from the last four years. The friends I have made here are wonderful people whom I will cherish for the rest of my life. I’ve found myself, developed as an intellectual and as an individual. I guess, at the end of it all, what I really want to say is thank you to all of the people who made my experiences possible.

-LS Marijuana is tearing this university apart.

-LS Graduating is supposed to make you feel a certain way, or certain ways. I’m supposed to feel wistful, or satisfied, or nostalgic, or terrified. It’s a milestone that looms over the next month like a vengeful shadow, promising days of reminiscing with friends and having meaningful experiences. The problem is that all I want to do right now is get the fuck out.

Senioritis is normal, and even a thing that I’m supposed to be feeling, but it’s not so much that I’m over work. I’m at the same level of occasional engagement and frustration that I’ve always been with coursework, but I’m starting to feel that way about everything else, too. When I look at my busy calendar of senior thesis presentations, free food events, and various arts and cultural events (#sobougie), I realize that all I’m looking forward to is going home in a couple weeks and pretending that Brown and post-Brown don’t exist.

Maybe it would be easier if I had the sense of completion that other people have gotten with honors theses or Ph.D. program acceptances. As it is, I’ve split my time between an abandoned concentration, a completed one that I did the bare minimum for, and a smattering of other departments that I have few ties to. I’m having a hard time conjuring up emotion for a place that I sometimes had a difficult relationship with.

It’s possible this feeling is temporary, motivated by the revelation that I have five (!) papers due in the next three weeks. But it’s also that I didn’t blossom academically, creatively, and personally until the last year or so, and it was often despite of rather than because of Brown.

I’m not bitter. I wouldn’t change my experience for the world, and I don’t feel defeated. But I do feel done.

The idea that college is the best time of your life is a poisonous one. I think I’ve done my best to make the most of it, and it’s been the best part of my life so far, but I’m also convinced that the best is still yet to come. If graduation is death is eternal sleep, hit me. I’m tired.

-LS HAGS -LS To the one guy that always ruined section: Bye! -LS The trick to the SciLi challenge is just to have 13 shots before you even start.

-LS I’m just going to write about graduating from Post- because if I start thinking about graduating in general, this’ll get too serious and sad. (I say “start” as though it’s not already happening. I think about graduating [and post-grad life, and friends moving all over the country, and how every single aspect of my life after May 29 is a complete mystery] approximately 700 times a day.)

But thinking about the end of my time at Post- is at least a little bit easier. I started writing for Post- during my junior fall at Brown after deciding that if I wanted to be a writer, I should probably actually do some writing. A semester later (keeping up my philosophy of trying one new club or activity per semester— a great way to keep college interesting), I joined the staff as a copy editor and have been spending every Wednesday night with these goofy, thoughtful, passionate editors and writers ever since. I can’t think of a better group of people to debate with over the most important things in life: comma placement and what toppings to order on our weekly Nice Slice. We joke a lot about not having many readers (if you’re actually reading this, text me at 302-388-3751! For science!), but maybe having lots of readers doesn’t matter. Maybe what matters is the friendships we built along the way … just kidding, I can’t let my last words

at Post- be a meme. I’ve had a great time working on Post- the last two years as I’ve grown more confident in my skills as a writer and editor, and I’m really going to miss hanging out with this silly, wonderful group of people every Wednesday night.

-LS I’m starting a PhD program at Stanford in the fall, but I want you to know that the academic success I’ve found in the end doesn’t mean that I didn’t have academic failures along the way. I have some B’s on my record, including two in the field I intend to study for the rest of my life. I also have a C from freshman year (in a field I hope to never have to study again). I’m not advocating that you try to get a C—I should have dropped the class, to be honest—but I nevertheless want to remind you that it all turned out well anyway. I remember opening my grades that December, seeing that C, staring at it for a solid five minutes, and then straight-up panicking. I had always thought that I was really smart, and here it was, the evidence that, actually, I wasn’t smart enough. But if I’ve learned anything from Brown, it’s that the world is filled with a great diversity of talents, interests, and backgrounds, and that diversity is an incredibly valuable and beautiful thing. One of the toughest lessons you’ll learn in college is that you can’t be great at everything.

But you will be great at something. So I won’t be a chemist. Someone at Brown will be, though. And while they do that, I’ll be a political scientist instead. Luckily, I found what I was passionate about, and I worked hard at it, and then I found success. It’s a simple formula, really, but I promise it works!

-LS Here’s the advice I know you don’t want to hear: Do the readings. Seriously.

Do the readings. I know that not everyone does them, and that, often, you don’t actually need to do all the readings to get an A in the class. That doesn’t matter, in the end, because the value of your education is what you get out of it,

not the letter grade on your transcript.

On a similar note, if you enjoy a book you read for a class, keep it, don’t sell it back. (The bookstore pays you nothing for them anyway, and for that matter, always buy your books online.)

-LS Good Luck!

-LS Post- was a gateway into writing at Brown, for me. I’ve had an amazing time working for this organization and others on campus, and I feel that those experiences have really shaped my skills as a writer, editor, and reader. The clubs and the people who devote everything to them are an essential part of making Brown what it is.

-LS I joined Post- as an editor the start of my junior year, and when I walked into 195 Angell St. that first time I decided that—unlike in every other extracurricular I’ve ever done—I was not going to spend the first year or so being intimidated by how much older and/or more knowledgeable than me everyone else was. It was a good decision (even if it’s only medium possible to talk yourself into something like that, it still helps to try). Two years later, Wednesday nights are one of the most reliably fun parts of my week. Post- has seen some changes over the last two years—we keep track of our progress through Production Night semi-reliably online instead of unreliably on a whiteboard now; we no longer have any Y chromosomes in the room; we just took a mass field trip to Ben and Jerry’s; and I’m pretty sure in fall 2014 one person uploaded all of our articles to our website and now our website has been down for the last three weeks (jk, where I was actually going with that was that now we have a ~system~). All the way through, though, it’s been great. I’m so glad I decided on a whim to respond to a Morning Mail ad in summer 2014.

Thanks for the memories, and the pizza, and the boxed wine, and all the rest.

You’re all in my Top 10.

4

features

-LS “Besides his bein’ kinda crazy, they called him the Smoking Loon ‘cause he was just so dam’ efficient,” Jake began, stubbing out his cigar. “He’d take care of business an’ get in an’ out before anybody’d see him comin’... leavin’ no trace ‘cept the lingerin’ sound of his eerie, loon-like cackle. No one was really sure who he was or who he worked for, but when word got out that someone needed his services, the Smoking Loon just appeared on their doorstep, like outta thin air or somethin.”

-SL “Sometimes you find out what you are supposed to be doing by doing the things you are not supposed to do.”

(OPRAH) -LS

While I write this blurb, I am simultaneously checking my email, eating pizza,

drinking cider, editing a history essay, writing an English paper, listening to about a dozen people discuss the kosherness of cookie dough, and trying not to think about the fact that I am moving to Boston in almost exactly a month and have no form of employment lined up whatsoever. And I thought handing in my thesis would be the end of college stress.

That being said, I wrote a thesis! On an icebreaker topic that makes bigwigs go “whoa”! Yes I still have to present on it. Yes I will probably revisit it in grad school and end up scrapping the whole thing. Yes my mental health is fine.

The state of mild mania that I am evidently in right now is pretty par for the course for college students; and it’s weird to think that I now have the experiential authority to claim this fact with full validity. It’s weird to think that in almost exactly a month, my entire academic

life is potentially in my rear-view mirror. No more homework, no more Old White Male™ professors, no more essays to write till dawn’s early light. Don’t remind me that I plan to get a masters in a few years. For now (once I have a job), home is home and work is work. Maybe I’ll get a cat. Maybe I’ll find a significant other so I can get a dog without having to walk it myself. Maybe I’ll get a cat-dog crossbreed with a mutated gene that allows it to breathe fire and melt the faces of the Old White Male™ professors who made me want to rip my own face off so often.

I am drinking cider. I am not used to drinking cider. You can tell, can’t you.

There must be something profound I can say. There must be some poetry, a sonnet, a beautiful ode to the college experience that will make this blurb more memorable than all the others (remember me, dammit).

But this is all I got: I survived the first 21+ years of my life. I will soon have a pretty diploma to hang on a wall, touting my Ivy League degree for the rest of my pretentious, obnoxious, snootynosed existence.

But more importantly. I have survived. You can’t get more profound than that.

-LS It’s weird that pirates went from shore to shore looking for treasure when the real treasure was the friends they made along the way.

-LS P.S. Secretly, I’m the one that burned down Keeney.

-LS Illustration by Katie Cafaro

a congestion of the brain fighting information overload ANNE-MARIE KOMMERS staff writer Is there a limit to the amount of information we can mentally process in a day? Is there a limit to how efficient we can make menial tasks to save time?

Might we someday become as efficient as it is possible to be, the J curve of human progress ending at a fixed point?

These are the kinds of questions that science writer James Gleick asks in the final chapter of his 1999 book, “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.” As the title suggests, Gleick’s book discusses how nearly everything— from our modes of correspondence and transportation, to the beat of modern music, to the number of shots a commercial can squeeze into a five-second slot—is accelerating at breakneck speed.

Much of Gleick’s book is about speed on a societal level, but one particular chapter about personal “Internet Time” reso-

nated with me.

“Speed is connectivity,” Gleick says.

“The state of being connected makes [people and businesses] more efficient…

Sadly, it also makes them feel busier— maybe even overloaded.”

We have all felt this way: simultaneously enamored with our connected lives and overwhelmed by the amount of information we are taking in every day. I have often found myself mentally exhausted at the end of the day, incapable of processing any more information, yet I continue to compulsively scroll through the internet. I vaguely want to stop and go to sleep, but I feel that I can’t.

There is a term for this feeling: information overload, or “infomania.” According to an article on NPR, there is in fact a limit to how much information we can take in on a single day. So why do

so many of us strain our brains against this limit?

Consumer psychologist Dimitrios Tsivrikos explains in the article that socalled “digital junkies” are “starving for information” because they think that high levels of information will keep them better informed. In reality, a person who takes in too much information in a single day is not storing this information in any lasting, memorable way. It is the informational equivalent of swallowing your food without bothering to taste or chew it.

The article included a link to a website called Infomagical, of which the article’s authors were founding members.

Infomagical, I learned, is a kind of fiveday public experiment in reducing information overload. The program promised to help me “find focus and discover the magic of clear thinking.”

Intrigued, I signed up right away.

For the next five days, I received daily text messages with advice about controlling my media consumption. When I set up my account there were five goals for the week to choose from; I chose “Being More Creative,” but other options included “Being More in Tune With Yourself ” and “Being More in Touch With Family and Friends.”

Each day, Infomagical sent me challenges and reminders intended to increase my creativity.

The first day’s challenge was “single tasking.” Instead of checking my email while reading the news and texting a friend, I tried to do each of these tasks individually.

The next day I was told to rearrange the apps on my

phone to make them less distracting: I deleted all the apps that I didn’t use or that only served to distract me, and I reorganized the remaining apps into folders. The following day, I was told to ignore all internet trends and then to have a seven-minute conversation with someone about a piece of media I had recently consumed.

These daily challenges did not necessarily make me more creative, but they did help me to find focus. The main problem I have been having with the internet is that it distracts me from focusing on any one thing at a time. When I am thinking about my email, the morning news, a paper I have to write, and texting my friend back all at once, each task is fraught with an artificial sense of hurriedness, of not having enough time for anything. But when the tasks are broken down individually, I find that I actually have more time than I need to accomplish my goals.

My favorite challenge was the last one: Write down a long-term rule or mantra to combat information overload, and place reminders wherever you consume information. After much thought, I chose a humorous but practical piece of advice from Ron Swanson of the show “Parks and Recreation”: “Don’t half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

What really won me over about Infomagical was that it is not “anti” information. The website acknowledges the importance of knowledge accumulation and curiosity. Rather than encourage me to stop my internet usage altogether, Infomagical helped me to sort out my priorities and ignore the excess information that was not important to my weekly goal of being more creative. The challenges showed me that my main sources of distraction and anxiety, my phone and computer, could also be used as tools to combat information overload.

Illustration by Clarisse Angkasa

lifestyle

5

red beans and rice

bad times call for good foods

BLAKE PIEL contributing writer They arrived the day before landfall, in groups both large and small. One after another they flooded into our house with their pets, air mattresses, and Styrofoam coolers, and it felt like Mardi Gras in August. Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans the next day, and my relatives from New Orleans lurked apprehensively around the television screen.

Katrina had been downgraded to a Category Three storm the day before impact, so Uncle Billy chose to stay in his home at the last minute. It wasn’t his first time waiting out a hurricane. With a radio and his cellphone, he slept in the bathtub—shelter from any tornados that might spin off the hurricane’s edge. The next morning my Uncle Tommy received a call from him saying that Katrina was a nonevent, everyone could head back now, the sun was shining. Relief gushed over; everything was OK. Then Uncle Billy called back. In a panic he told Uncle Tommy the water was rising, his house was flooding, the levee must have broken. He hung up mid-sentence.

The next week was confusing, and everyone seemed to be in a daze. We had 22 people stuffed into our five-bedroom house, each with only a week’s worth of clothes. The news wasn’t saying which neighborhoods had flooded, and it wasn’t until satellite images of the city were released that they could finally know. My aunts, cousins, greataunts, uncles, and even more distant relatives used the satellite images to zoom in on their homes and only saw black roofs peeking out of the water.

I think everyone cried at least once that first week.

They were exiles now, jobless, homeless, and

completely jarred, like something had hit them in the stomach and they couldn’t catch their breath.

I have paradoxical memories about those first two weeks. At the same time that I was stunned to see my raucous Cajun family so somber, I recall gorging myself joyously on their food. Predicting power outages during the hurricane, they had piled all their frozen seafood in ice chests and taken it with them so it wouldn’t rot in their absence.

But now that there was no chance of return, they were left with mountains of crab, shrimp, oysters, red fish, and tuna and zero freezer space in our house. We had seafood for every meal those first weeks, in gumbos, fillets and creoles. My uncles are avid fishermen and as we ate they would recount the stories of each meal placed before us.

Most of the fish were caught from the same Lake Pontchartrain that had broken the levee and decimated their homes.

After a few weeks, it began to dawn on everyone that we were in this for the long haul.

Twenty-two people, plus my family of five, shared our house for three months, and about ten more were always present for meals. Friends of ours had offered their houses to the ten who couldn’t fit.

The living room became a bedroom, and hallway floors became beds. The dining room became a pantry, packed full of canned goods, pasta, pop tarts, and so much toilet paper. The tower of toilet paper stacked against the wall looked like a year’s supply, but in reality it had to be replenished weekly. My aunts took turns making trips to Wal-Mart every day, and since we didn’t have a dining room we started to eat dinner in three

shifts. Something was always cooking, and every day became Thanksgiving. We feasted on jambalayas and crawfish etoufée and eagerly forked down baked mirliton and oyster dressings. Two huge cast iron gumbo pots continuously gurgled on the stove top, filled with red beans or turtle soup or seafood gumbo. It was the end of summer, so many nights we ate outside, standing around huge foldable tables covered in newspaper. We would have crawfish, crab, and shrimp boils weekly, or spend the afternoon shucking raw oysters. My uncles continuously grilled boudin sausages, hamburgers, and hot dogs.

Around the dinner table, in front of plates heaped high with Papa Gravy on top of baked macaroni, news and stories were exchanged, people laughed and people cried. My Aunt Debby and Aunt Loey told us that while shopping at Wal-Mart, a stranger in line behind them picked up their $500 grocery bill when he recognized their accents. We laughed when the septic tank overflowed because it could not accommodate the amount of hungry people in our house and had to be drained three times.

My Uncle Billy came to live with us too, and I heard his story over dinner the first night he was with us. Nobody had heard from him for the ten days after he hung up on my Uncle Tommy.

The water was rising fast in his house, then had swamped into the inside of his fishing boat in the front yard, so he had to take refuge on the roof of his house with only his dog for company. He was trapped on that roof for three days without food or supplies. The rescue boat came at night with no

lights. They made him talk to them before they came close, because, as they later explained, they were trying to determine whether he was black or white. They weren’t picking up black people for fear of “being looted.” They wouldn’t let him take his dog, so they gave him a knife and he slit its throat.

He stayed in the Superdome for a few days, sleeping in shifts with another man because the dome was a madhouse of rape, looting, and murder. After ten days of failing to contact us, he was transported to an army base in Oklahoma. He called my Uncle Tommy and said they wouldn’t let him leave the base unless someone came in person to verify his identity. Uncle Tommy picked him up, and my aunts had a present waiting for him with dinner that night: a rain suit and a bottle of vodka. The two things he had wanted most on that roof. We all noticed a change in Uncle Billy. He used to be sarcastic and rude, generally an unlikeable man, but over the next few months it became apparent he wasn’t the same person. He was nicer, and had a gentle quality to him.

The hummingbirds were migrating then, and now every year when they swarm my backyard, I am reminded of that happy time in my life. I think, like Uncle Billy, we all grew gentler in those months. We had to. Bickering and blaming the world wasn’t going to change things, so we all kept smiling and made sure everyone knew that even though some things were lost forever, family dinners never would be.

Ilustration by Stephanie Zhou

speculative self-defense walking in the dark

YAMINI MANDAVA contributing writer It’s 11:30.

Why is it so dark?

Where is the moon when you need a natural light source?

Should I call Safe Walk?

The walk from the Rock to Wayland is three minutes long.

I don’t need to call Safe Walk.

See? There’s security personnel everywhere.

I’m going to stay on this side of the road.

The pavement is wider. I’d have more time if a car came out of nowhere.

More time for what?

Scream maybe, or run?

But run where?

Back to the Rock?

Back to the Rock if it happens before I reach the halfway point between the Rock and Wayland. Otherwise, Wayland.

What is the halfway point between the Rock and Wayland?

Maybe a minute from where I am now.

Okay, that’s not bad.

If I do get attacked, I won’t have to walk to and from the Rock again.

But what if I’m attacked by someone walking? Then I should stand closer to the road so that the street lights make it easier for people to see me and help.

Getting attacked by a pedestrian would be so much harder to fight.

I’d scream if my mouth wasn’t covered.

I’d bite if my mouth was covered.

If chloroform was used, I guess there’s nothing I’d be able to do.

Didn’t I read a paper about chloroform being a carcinogen?

The chance that I might get cancer after being physically assaulted might not be my attacker’s primary concern.

But maybe the attacker will be worried that they might get cancer from interacting with chloroform.

If someone behind me was about to cover my mouth with a pad of chloroform, maybe I could duck and smash their hand into their own face.

Then they’d pass out.

Then I could just run.

If someone did come up behind me, what would I do?

They taught us how to respond in that self defense seminar I take each year.

What was it?

Groin. Ribs. Face?

Something like that.

So, elbow to groin?

No. That wouldn’t work. They last taught that when I was six.

Elbow to ribs.

Heel to groin.

What about the face?

Fingers in nose? Slap with an open palm?

Punch with a closed fist?

Do you punch with your thumb inside or outside the closed fist?

What if someone came up to me from the front?

Then I’d see them.

I’d be better prepared.

But how would I know until they attacked me?

Can I identify an attacker from a mile away?

How would that work though?

They’d have a scarlet A for abuser on their clothes?

That’s nuts.

Okay, but seriously. If someone came up to me from the front, what would I do?

Use one hand to cover my lower abdomen, and use the other to slap?

What was the rule for slapping?

Is it use your palm or use your fingers?

I think it’s use the base of your palm.

That seems like a strong part of the body.

So then what?

There’s no way I’m strong enough to make this person fall over.

I can barely push a revolving door open.

Best case scenario: The person is startled, and I can start running.

I run slowly.

I blame how weird my legs are.

They’re like giraffe legs.

I have control of, like, the third of my legs that are closest to my torso.

The rest is just unknowable to me.

I should really shave my legs.

The way it’s going down there, a lot more about my legs is going to become unknowable to me.

Didn’t someone make leggings that have fake body hair on them to repel sexual assaulters?

Assaulters is not a word.

Sexual assault perpetrators? So clunky.

Assailants!

The leggings with the hair on them are so anti-feminist.

Like supermodels are more prone to being raped than the rest of us?

I should buy pepper spray.

How safe is the safety valve on travel-size pepper spray?

I would definitely attack myself with it if I carried it around all the time.

Do you remember the time I was spraying bleaching fluid onto a shirt and pointed the nozzle at myself instead of the shirt?

If I did that when I was being attacked, I’d make it so much easier for the assailant to attack me.

What was the other thing they had in the rape kit toolbelt thing?

There was a pepper spray, a plastic knife, and a whistle.

That’s so stupid.

It would be so much easier for me to scream than to find a whistle, put it in my mouth and start blowing.

And if my mouth was covered, I wouldn’t be able to do either.

Someone should really come up with a better rape kit.

I really hope it isn’t called a rape kit.

Where’s my ID? Is it in my backpack?

Why won’t the swipey-thing read my card?

Aah! P.S. I want women everywhere who worry about how to defend themselves from being attacked by a stranger to know that this speculation is pointless. If you are assaulted, there’s an 82 percent chance that it’ll be by someone you know.

Illustration by Jenice Kim

6

arts & culture

less than pennies a day capitalism and the sum of years MOLLIE FORMAN a&c section editor Just days ago, I turned in my thesis. Over a year of work across two continents has brought me to this 130-page behemoth (or so it feels to me) of knowledge, a tome to chronicle my learning experience through four years of undergrad. I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading Freud and Lacan and Haraway and Edelman and any number of lesser-known theorists; I’ve spent dozens of hours watching the films my thesis is about.

Since the beginning of winter break, hardly a day has gone by when you wouldn’t find me holed up in Blue State, over-priced latte in hand, hunched over a batch of psychoanalytic theory or staring at my screen and willing the words to come to life. I spent $25 having a pair of copies bound—one for the department, one for myself—and I will graduate with the word “Honors” on my diploma. I’m not sure exactly what that means in terms of boosting my future prospects, but I assume it’s a good thing. It certainly can’t hurt.

I’ve learned many things about myself and the world through this experience. I’ve learned that if I work, and work, and work, eventually even the most impossible-seeming task can be completed; I’ve learned exactly how far I’ve come from that scared pre-frosh who arrived at ADOCH four years ago.

Conversations with current freshmen have illuminated for me exactly how great an accomplishment this is. When I mention the length of my project, they cower in fear, and

I think—eh. It wasn’t too bad. Stressful, yes.

Agonizing and arduous and at times enough to make me question my worth as a person.

But I did it, and everything seems easier once it’s finished.

What’s troubling me now is what comes next. I handed in my thesis. I’m free—from this project, at least. I hold these 130 pages of labor in my hands. And I have no idea where the fuck to go from here.

I could turn it into a book. That’s always been a half-formed plan in my head anyway.

A few more years of labor and voila, a marketable product that will do more than sit on my shelf as a testament to my long-ago academic accomplishments.

Because that’s what all this will feel like in a month—long ago. A different world where I was privileged enough that money was, for the most part, the purview of my parents; where I could spend my days reading theory and writing papers and never wondering what lies beyond all of this.

Well, now I’m faced with that Great Beyond beyond academia. I’ve been to job interviews; I’ve realized that whatever salary I get very likely won’t pay for the beautiful apartment I’ve found in Cambridge; I’ve looked back over four years of labor and realized—so what?

I’m not trying to say that a liberal learning education is useless; far from it. But we all exist inside a capitalist system that exploits the majority of people and privileges substantial, marketable products over inner growth.

With better perspective on this great machine of capitalism we spin within, I’ve realized exactly what the only tangible products of my humanities degree add up to— and in real world terms, it’s bupkis.

Think about the numbers. As an individual who hasn’t taken a single STEM course in my time at Brown, the vast majority of my labor has been in producing papers. Paper after paper after paper, what must be hundreds of pages by now, each agonized over for hours and handed in for a grade and then relegated to the back of my hard-drive. If my thesis is at a proverbial dead end, where will all of this work go?

That’s the quandary I face. My family has paid for as much of my tuition as they can afford so that I could have the privilege of performing free writing labor, the vast majority of which isn’t likely to lead anywhere—at least not anywhere that it will be compensated. Aside from departmental awards, there are very few places where these term papers have a chance of monetary compensation. They aren’t highbrow enough for scholarly journals, and are too obscure for most other publications. As far as I’m aware, Brown doesn’t go out of its way to advertise awards or journals that do take undergraduate work. As I stand at the cusp of monetary independence, I have four years of written labor behind me that could potentially give me a cushion should the job market fail me—and yet, in this time when I could have been writing for magazines or blogs or building a professional portfolio that is applicable outside academia, I have done little but write essays that, once again, are going nowhere.

I don’t mean to demean the value of a Brown education, or a degree from Brown itself. At the end of the day, I’ve received an incredible education, and the network of alumni, within Brown and throughout the Ivy League, will no doubt prove invaluable to my future career. The sum of my written labor has contributed to something magnificent.

I don’t like thinking of writing like an equation. It’s too personal for me. In the best moment of any writing experience, nothing else exists—there is me, my outline, the blank space of the document, and the knowledge I’ve accrued all swirling together to form a product I can be proud of. Academic work is often dismissed as dry or out of touch with the real world, but it doesn’t have to be, and

I’ve put enough of myself into each individual essay that to hear someone say so becomes something close to a personal insult. Every essay, from five pages to 130, has changed me as a person and as a writer.

But I’m in the real world now, and I can’t help wondering whether my time might have been better spent worrying a little less about essays and a little more about work that could actually transcend the academic experience. It calls into question all sorts of “free” writing labor—fanfiction, for example, is part of what my friend Sunny (and academics) calls a “gift economy” that runs on exchange of pleasure rather than paper. I would never cheapen the time I’ve spent participating in this world, and neither, I think, would the professional authors who partake in the same activity. But whether you are considering fanfiction or academic essays, it leads back to the same question—when does written labor, done for free, become exploitation? And is it a challenge to the “purity” of liberal learning (or fandom, for that matter) to question why we spend four years producing work that is, in a broader capitalist context, essentially useless?

I don’t have answers to these questions.

I am immensely proud of the work I have done at Brown. I might never find monetary compensation for “The Flashy Girl From Flatbush: Barbra Streisand and Jewish Iconicity,” but, hell, it was fun to write. I learned a lot. It gave me lessons in organization and structure and all of those elemental elements that make any kind of writing tick. I can’t hold it up to a non-academic employer as an example of future work, but I can show them the dedication I devote to my craft, my flexibility across mediums, and how much effort I put into writing whether capitalism “approves” of it or not.

I approve of it. I enjoy it, arduous as much of it has been. College is short, and life is long, and dead ends can be overcome.

I hope so, at least. Otherwise, Brown owes me far more than $25 for binding a pair of theses.

Illustration by Mary O’Connor

face the future

doctor who, commencement, and what happens in between

ABBY MULLER managing editor of a&c This article contains spoilers for the “Doctor Who” episodes “Face the Raven,” “Heaven Sent,” and “Hell Bent” (Series 9, episodes 10-12).

This is an article about endings. Ironically, I’m not sure how to start it; beginnings have never been my forte. I want to write about the end of Series 9 of “Doctor Who,” a three-episode sequence that gutted me when I watched it over winter break and hit every note just

right when I rewatched it last night. I want to write about commencement and how much I feel whenever I think about it and how it still doesn’t feel like it’s coming, even now that it’s just a month away. I want to write about loving things and leaving things. I want to write about this.

The Series 9 finale of “Doctor Who” understands memory. Callbacks are my favorite narrative tool—the right words (or staging,

or musical cue) can bring us right back to an earlier moment through the lens of now, using hindsight to bring us pain or peace. At the end of Series 4 of “Doctor Who,” the Doctor, a time-traveling hero, has lost everyone. Furious and burning with grief, he goes too far trying to bend the universe to save people, too far trying to become a god, and loses himself.

Ultimately, it’s four knocks on a door that brings him back—four knocks that, within

the context the show has set up, mean that in the end he’s just as subject to the laws of the universe as everyone else. It’s a hard-won moment, the emotional pinnacle of the season. When the Doctor loses someone again in Series 9, it comes back. Once again driven by grief, he tries to outwit the laws of time and space. As he’s teetering on the brink of that same edge, someone knocks on the door.

It hasn’t been mentioned for five seasons, but

arts & culture

we’re back, and this time, the Doctor knows what it means. “It’s always four knocks.”

The line plays on exactly the right memories, exactly the right moments. It shows us the Doctor’s now in the context of his then.

Callbacks done right (like this one) are, for me, what make stories feel the most like life.

They’re about what stays the same and what changes and what happens in all the spaces in between.

This piece is, in some ways, a callback. The first article I ever wrote for Post- was about endings. It ran on October 1, 2014, in the fall of my junior year. I wrote about how endings are important: how in some ways, meaning comes from things ending, and ending imperfectly, with both emotional resolution and loose ends. About how nothing can last forever, and how TV shows shouldn’t. I mentioned “Doctor Who,” which ends over and over with every major character’s departure (which happens every couple of seasons) but will never really conclude. I revise that criticism in the wake of Series 9, which I think finally understands endings. They’re sad, the show tells us, and they’re beautiful. They’re sad because they’re an end to something beautiful, and they’re beautiful because there’s poignancy in the fact that they make us feel so much at all.

Commencement will be, in some ways, a callback as well. I’m bad at endings, too; I like middles, the part when everything is familiar. As a homesick freshman those first weeks

at Brown, missing my family and my high school friends and above all anything familiar, I looked ahead. If I’m this sad about missing what’s familiar now, I comforted myself, sitting on the Quiet Green and looking at the Van Wickle Gates, imagine how sad I’ll be four years from now to leave this place. It’ll be familiar, someday. It’ll be everything I know and love, and god, I’m going to miss it.

Callbacks are about what stay the same, and they’re about what has changed, and most of all they’re about everything that happens in the space between the two. Faces that are barely familiar become the faces of best friends. Routes and roads that are unfamiliar become the landscape of home. The gates open, and they shut, and they open again, and then you walk through.

In the Series 9 finale, the Doctor loses someone: Clara, his best friend. It’s this loss that drives him to that four-knock moment, and it’s with that loss that the show, for the first time in seasons, gets endings right. I don’t want it to sound like I’m comparing graduation to death, so it’s important that I tell you that although Clara dies, she doesn’t, really.

It’s the kind of thing only “Doctor Who” can pull off. She dies, and it’s sad, desperately sad, and it’s beautiful too, because she dies exactly as she lives—bold and a little flippant and warm and clever and strong and always all her own. She dies because she’s so similar to the Doctor in all ways but two, her name and her

humanity (with her warmth and the fact that she is, in the end, breakable), and instead of punishing her, the show rewards her in the end. The Doctor, railing against the laws we mortals all obey in the end, pulls her out of time, keeping her alive in the space between one heartbeat and the last. They steal a TARDIS. She keeps it. And she takes off, on her own, through space and time.

It’s a death, but it’s not, not really: Mostly, it’s just an ending. And it’s sad. And it’s beautiful.

“These have been the best years of my life,” Clara says, “and they are mine.”

A number of years ago, my dad, a Brown alum, was back on campus for a conference over one sunny Spring Weekend. I must’ve been in middle school, or maybe younger, but it stuck with me. He walked past Wriston during the Dave Binder concert, and I remember him reporting back: “There was this guy with an acoustic guitar, and I stood there near the fence and heard him say, ‘someday you’re going to look back on this and think, the sun was shining, I was with my friends, and I was having the time of my life.’ And I stood there,” my dad continued, “and thought, it’s true. It’s true.”

May 29 is almost here, and I’m arriving at a place where I’m actually a little excited for what comes after. I’ve got a whole life ahead of me. I get to find a career I value, explore new cities, visit museums, go for hikes. Fall

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in love, maybe. Fall in love with all of it in the little ways that feel like sitting in the sun.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be ready to walk through those gates, but if there’s one more thing that Clara’s final episodes of “Doctor Who” get right, it’s that endings are beginnings too.

About a month from now—how is it still so far off, and still so soon?—I’ll put on a cap and gown, and I’ll walk through a gate I once watched from the Quiet Green, and then I’ll pack my boxes and leave Brown’s campus. It won’t be the last time I’m here, because I have the whole rest of my life ahead of me. But it will be the last time it’s home. The last time before it’s my past.

It will be an ending. It’s going to be sad.

And it’s going to be beautiful.

Illustration by Peter Herrera

the dorm room mengerie brown’s stuffed study buddies

LUCIA IGLESIAS staff writer At Reichenau Abbey in the ninth century, a monk who ought to have been transcribing a Latin primer stopped to flex his aching fingers. His eyes bleared when he looked down at the page of hymns and verb tables. “Enough of this!” he thought to himself. “I was made for higher work than rote transcription and scribo, scribis, scribit. I shall compose a poem about my white cat.” And so he did. Right in the margin of the primer manuscript. In precisely metered, rhyming medieval Irish.

I and Pangur Bán my cat, ‘Tis a like task we are at: Hunting mice is his delight, Hunting words I sit all night.* How pithily the unnamed monk encapsulates the ideal life of the felinophile scholar. For seven more stanzas he goes on rhyming about the two of them: how each pursues his own life’s work, two masters of their crafts, companionable in quiet diligence.

Even today, cats are the perfect comrades for pulling all-nighters. They’ll bounce on your keyboard, deleting that vapid introductory paragraph. They’ll lick the Ben & Jerry’s from your bowl so you can focus on typing. They’ll curl up in your lap, purring your worries away.

When anxiety strikes, I can always call my mother, but sometimes what I really need is a way to dial our cat Mittens into my lap. Her presence extinguishes my worries almost instantaneously. Unlike a conversation with mom, Mittens works on a purely physical level to counteract the petrifying somatic symptoms of anxiety.

The resonant frequencies of her purr, the rhythm of her paws kneading my leg, and the mass of this overweight feline sinking into me—these three elements compound to produce the perfect antidote to anxiety.

While no cat, no matter how fat, could ever fill the place of Mittens on my lap, there is something inexplicably rejuvenating about burying my face in the fur of any tolerant four-footed friend. Fortunately Brown provides on-campus programs like Heavy Petting and the recently launched Animal Assisted Therapy Program, offering students that irreplaceable nose-to-nose nuzzle time and maybe even a lick on the cheek.

However, the bitter fact remains that dorm regulations and most off-campus leases ban housecats and furry friends of all species (with the exception of service animals) from our scholarly lives. No doubt the 9th century monk of Reichenau would have some snippy rhymes for ResLife.

So in the absence of living, breathing, barking, purring companions to accompany us on long nights of study, we adopt the stuffed species.

When the words I need to write my thesis skitter away into the corners of the room, hiding out amongst the dust buffalos under the sofa, I scoop up my other cat, the stuffed calico, and sit her down between me and the laptop. I call her Queen Medb (Maeve), after the battle queen of Old Irish lore. Her calico faux-fur is softer than dandelion-down. As I scratch her behind the ears, deadline fears disappear and the shy words crawl out of the corners.

She’s no Mittens, but the weight of her beanbag belly is familiar enough to synthesize the Mittens-effect. With Medb in my arms, I can write again.

“They’re moral support when I’m doing homework,” said Emily, one of the students I interviewed for this article one

Saturday afternoon in the Ratty. Emily has four stuffed friends in her dorm room.

“Most people I know brought a stuffed animal with them. It’s kind of an important thing.”

Antonia’s bed is home to a whole menagerie. “I have two bunnies, a polar bear, and two bears.” She laughs. “I’m like a little kid.” But the animals aren’t just there for cuddles. Each is a memento from someone special: her mother, her sister, a close friend.

“It reminds me of home and family,” said Shiying of her bear. “All the stuff I had back in China.” Although she has several stuffed animals at home, only one could come with her to Brown. “It was my favorite at home, so I brought it here.”

But for other students, memories of home and family can’t be tied in the bow around a stuffed bear’s neck. “I’m from rural Arizona. I’m Navajo, and the way I was raised, I didn’t really have that sort of stuff,” explains Tyler. “I only lived with my dad mainly. He’s more like the person that

hauls wood, and chops stuff. Outdoorsman, I would say. So I didn’t have that stuff much.”

Then again, some stuffed animals aren’t here as mementos of childhood or moral support. Some stuffed animals have their own reasons for existing. Meet Noah’s giraffe. His name is Professor Giraffe and “he teaches philosophy.” When Noah and Professor Giraffe hang out, Noah likes to “put sweaters on him.”

A giraffe in a sweater What could be better Perhaps this is how the monk of Reichenau would begin the sequel to Pangur Bán if he were still rhyming away in his scriptorium today. *Translation by Robin Flower Illustration by Emma Marguiles

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lifestyle

topten sweaters 1. the turtleneck sleeveless sweater dress 2. the sweater your grandmother gave you in second grade you were

Professor: “My only prompt for this writing assignment is don’t turn in weak shit.”

“The Herald does not endorse unsafe sex practices.”

“Guys, Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina...”

“THEY’RE HAVING AN AFFAIR???”

“You can build an interview off of Bean.

Have done it before, will do it again.”

“

hot post time machine

“

A: “Why’d you delete that?”

B: “It looked weird.”

A: “You look weird, but I’m not going to delete you. That’s eugenics.”

forced to wear to Christmas dinner but didn’t wear otherwise 3. the pale yellow sweater 4. the crop-top sweater 5. the sweater you tell people you got at a garage sale but you actually got at urban outfitters 6. the brown ugly christmas sweater that’s actually a sweatshirt 7. dog sweaters (sweaters for dogs) 8. cardigans 9. gloves, sweaters for your hands 10. and likewise: socks. sweaters for your feet.

I got EMS’d on Spring Weekend. I woke up in the ER with not money, no ID, and no phone. Just a banana flavored condom in my wallet.

i’ve made a big mistake • 9/14/10

home for the holidays

these are only rumors of suffering

MELANIE ABEYGUNAWARDANA contributing writer Drowsy memories of memories. Early mornings in my grandmother’s house; sunlight stippled on waving palm. The street vendor’s vowels coasting like drones in the air.

Baloooooooot! A certain corner on 34th Street that smells densely of sweat and flowers and suddenly, without warning, the tropics. The Philippines. Sri Lanka. Whole countries pushing up through concrete and standing water.

This is how I construct my history. +++ My father likes to tell stories at certain lulls in dinner parties when the wine is just grading into whiskey and his smile looks raw and overscrubbed, like the floor after a spill. He speaks of his father and his calm silences, how sometimes you would have to wait 20 minutes for a one-word response. How fond he was of certain sweets. Stray dogs.

He never speaks of his brother, the one I have never seen in person or in photographs, the one who was murdered under mysterious circumstances, left bleeding in the Colombo dust. Death crossing oceans—the great colonizer. My great-uncle on my mother’s side beheaded by the Japanese while my grandmother nursed her oldest son in the jungles of Mindanao. A small body among roving leaves moving faster than the planes, the heavy treads. She hid in an abandoned farmhouse for months while my grandfather (a tax collector) brought them food, secretly.

High-school textbooks said that the soldiers were fond of cutting babies out of pregnant women’s wombs. My classmates wrinkled their noses as they scribbled in their notebooks. My aunt’s husband, the ex-priest, tells me, casually

(hand wrapped around a damp rag as he dries a plate), that his mother forded a river to get away from the soldiers, who stuck cattle prods in her mouth, on her belly. So every day is a good day! My own stomach is twisting in knots because of garlic and altitude. My mouth is dry as I smile, ceramic.

I cannot imagine any of this. +++ It is December 31 and hot on the steps of my grandfather’s mountain bukid in Bohol. I avert my eyes because I never thought I had an ancestral anything, and the knowledge is making my eyes burn the way my feet do in their new sandals. Our guide, a third or fourth cousin of mine, points out green growing things, which are neatly translated for me. My uncle tells me, a hundred years ago, your grandfather was one of those boys on the side of the road. I am ashamed that he feels the need to tell me this. I stare at a caribou pulling a rake through the paddy, just like the statue on my childhood shelf. They’ve been here for generations and generations. It’s amazing how time doesn’t change up here. I think about how thanks to ancestry.com my girlfriend can trace her lineage back to William the Conquerer, but here I am gazing at rice shoots and contemplating rain, no closer to knowing the ones who came before me because their names were either burned during the war or else thought not worthy of recording.

Your grandfather owned his first pair of shoes when he was 14 and slept with them on because he was so happy.

I think of my parents. My father a curlyhaired child in a one-room schoolhouse. My mother making Molotov cocktails on a uni-

versity campus, soldiers at the gates. My father confused by pancakes and maple syrup (he thought they were rotis). My mother on a plane, coconut trees twisting in a kaleidoscope.

My father inscribing his name carefully in the swirling Sinhalese characters he once knew how to read. My mother now next to me, older than her pictures, shielding her eyes under a sunhat, counting out bills—they’re family. The sunlight slipping across my feet, joining the other ghosts that once tripped across this grass.

Amazing how things change, right?

When I look up over the mountains, I see coconut trees spread like webbing over the ground, the ocean a shimmering suggestion in the distance. I think if I were to jump, all that foliage would spring up to meet me, dense and verdant as a memory. +++ The astrologer told my father that before he turned 25 he would almost meet his death, and that if he lived, he would marry a foreigner.

Ten years later, my father fell from a guava tree in Peredeniya trying to snag a prize fruit for a friend of his. He was so skinny that he thought that the branch could take his weight. But he knew—this is the way he tells it—after going that extra inch that this, this was it. There was no going back. I have dreams of that moment—of a knowledge of upcoming gravity, a phantom impact. In certain pictures, I look exactly like him. The bony product of all that violence, survived. +++ Do you plan to go back? a stranger on the train back to Providence asks me. Go where? I ask, stupidly. Back, he says, waving his hands

vaguely. There. Tumbling islands into peninsulas, east into south, family into family. The ocean roiling over the absence where I must— according to this man—rightfully, permanently, belong. I say, no, probably not, in the harsh crushed-ice consonant sounds that move too fast for my father to follow, triggering a guilt that I don’t fully understand. My alien tongue flapping in my alien mouth.

All languages, other than this, are lost to me.

Other strange facts: I have a birthmark the shape of a teardrop on my stomach, exactly within swimsuit sight range. On my upper arm, I have another birthmark, dagger-shaped and hazy, as if smudged by a pencil eraser. One night, my girlfriend, face against my stomach, exclaimed (one hand on belly, one hand on arm): Look! You have an island and an archipelago! Her fingers pale against my ribs.

When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, I was 10 years old and wide awake, twisting like a pupil in my blue twin sheets. A night terror, verified by morning. The ocean swelling like a tongue.

Christmas decorations staining the wall. Years later I can come up with no explanation for this, except that perhaps I am not so far away from these lands and skies and seas as I think.

Illustration by Michelle Ng