For those seeking a compassionate confidant, there is nothing more tempting than the blank pages of a diary. Diaries are the sacred secret holders and imaginary sympathetics of our childhood, the commiserator that remained when we felt more inclined to …
Apparently, in every Hallmark Christmas movie, the conflict happens exactly one hour and 35 minutes in and resolves itself in the final 25 minutes. In the final 25 minutes, the corporate businesswoman will save a dying small business and find …
I am mildly obsessed with my Google Calendar. The tab on my computer feels almost like a baby I take care of, filling its bottle with my daily activities and coddling it through constant rearrangement, ultimately building some future. Yet, …
At my high school, homeroom was in the middle of the day. After two blocks of 85-minute classes, 20 something or other teenagers and I would come together for seven minutes in Room 302—a health classroom, with the CPR dummies …
The year was 2010. I was five years old and finally allowed to watch television (my mother had a strict “no TV” rule until then). Quickly, my little mind was captivated. At first by the commercials advertising toys I would …
Dirt cake, Grandma and a wind-up lobster. These aren’t just things you may witness walking down the mean streets of Maine but essential components to Nick Jr.’s 2002 show “Max and Ruby.” If this show wasn’t a staple of your …
At sunrise in Rosemary Beach, Fla., I feel the chilly salt air in my face and the security of feeling as though I have the world to myself. Looking out at the white sand meeting the ocean, I feel content, …
We all gathered from Cape Cod, Mass. and Brooklyn, N.Y. and Belfast, Maine and Vienna, Austria as mere strangers up 57 stairs (we counted) to the bare white walls of Appleton Hall room 405, unknowing of the home it would …
While Serbs nowadays throw up a holy trinity salute to express their national pride and religion—like Albanians who sign an eagle across their chests with both hands—when I occasionally throw up my thumb, index and middle fingers in a photo, …
Early in the fall it is not rainy, but I decide to wear rain pants to lab anyway. We study mosses flagged by yellow tape for a few hours. The medium is found ballpoint pen on waterproof paper: my favorite …