Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.
It is so hard, in the midst of it, to see online dating as anything other than a means to an end—but it became much more palatable for me once I began to understand it as a life stage in its own right.
It’s unclear to me, still, how much of this was based in an adolescent desire for male approval.
Perhaps my first mistake was expecting that I would ever entirely grow out of it.
“I just need to know if it’s worth hoping,” we say. “Is this guy the One or not?”
The trouble was, though, that when I tried to imagine the stream of gold going on forever, my head would begin to thrum.
B: I think that it might be important to take a minute and savor the fact that you no longer actively think you’re terrible
Five bags of MAPEI Self Leveler Plus Indoor Self-Leveling Underlayment later, our living room is rather more level than it was before.
I was suddenly aware of everything: the squelch of the slider door’s rubber seal releasing as my brother came in from the yard. The creak and crash of the screen door to the garage behind my dad.
I am not sure how to accurately convey the unpleasantness of this experience. There was no part of my body that went gentle into that good night.
I remember my high school’s Friday morning chapel as uninspiring, but it seemed like everyone wanted to take part in the Class of 2010’s “senior chapel.”
I didn’t know how to write about a rain jacket on Palm Sunday after forty-four people died in their churches.
Stories of travel compel us, she says, because “more reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.”
Last fall, my much-delayed Megabus dropped me off in Chinatown at 2:30 a.m. I had seven percent battery life, four dollars in cash, and no idea how to get to Brooklyn.
Well, shit, Jesus.
But Nathan was right. I can’t plan for the apocalypse. I can only do what I believe to be useful and good now. I can only do what is in front of me.
Let America be America again.
Christians shouldn’t be surprised that people think we’re assholes. As a collective, we’ve thrown our weight behind some pretty misguided causes.
Here I am, commuting by car into the big city. Here I am, one half of a white couple in an immigrant town. Here I am, trying to live honestly in an unfamiliar place, with imagination and empathy.
At every milestone I’ve consciously met in this life, I’ve supposed that I’ll feel somehow different on the other side.
Strangers think it’s “cool” that I lived there, which, whatever it means, isn’t true. It was something else entirely.
I could feel the wind teasing my pigtails. I was positively gliding. Then I glanced backward, realized my dad was no longer behind me, and promptly fell off the bike.
The doctor asked me if I eat a balanced diet and exercise and I had to answer no on both counts. Banking. My health insurance coverage. I have no experience in shopping for used cars.
February 21, 2016, 4:15 p.m. Crate & Barrel, 777 Boylston St, Boston, Massachusetts. We are standing in front of a flatware display with an iPod scanner, bickering about the price of forks.
The tutor listens quietly. The anxious student is her seventh of the day. It’s a decent paper already, and convincing the student to restructure might be more trouble than it’s worth.
So there is some loss, too, in coming back, in confronting memory with reality, nostalgia with the irrepressible present, which is always other than I imagined it. I am other than I imagined at seven (or eight, or nine).
It seems odd to speak of the limits of human intimacy when anticipating our reunion; to record for the world the untold stories which are themselves just fragments of a billowing moment already passed away, to promise that I will fail again to share them fully.
I don’t know what it means to live a good life, or how I’m measuring it. I didn’t donate blood out of purely altruistic motivations—I’m a sucker for free snacks and affirmation. I have had a good life, an exciting life, and insofar as it depends on me, I’d like to keep that up. So something is enough for today.
And I’m thinking about how much I feel like Frankenstein’s monster, some days—pieced together, a compilation of chemicals without the animation that makes a life.
I was ten and had three consuming desires in life: a yellow bedroom, an American Girl doll, and a dog. So I was devastated, but prepared to bargain.
I thought of Cairo, of the refugee kids I met, the illiterate mothers, the desperately poor. And I stopped her to ask earnestly, “Where do you find hope?”
