I was eight, on the farm in India, catching butterflies. The pastel powder of their wings crumbled onto our fingers as we held them shut. We’d lift them up for examination, watch them wriggle, realize they were nothing but glorified ants, lose interest, forget we had lost interest and try to catch another one.
At school, I no longer had to wait. I was free to do as I pleased and ceased observing the day altogether. But strangely, immediately, Shabbat presented itself to me in a transfiguring light, the radical antidote to all that displeased me here.
Picture me this fall break, up on the Athenian acropolis, staring down the Parthenon, trying to figure out anything at all. It’s bright if that helps. I’m up there on a trip with Princeton’s Humanistic Studies Sequence. Written HUM, pronounced … Read More
Are people afraid that their deepest darkest secrets will make their way into the hands of their mortal enemies? Why do we see one person’s post on Facebook and instantly delve into a tumultuous back and forth between the meager efforts to protect our photos and the nonchalant I-don’t-give-a-fuck shoulder shrug?
As a man who is, how shall I say, genetically endowed with the gift of growing facial hair at a fast and heavy pace, I had always been a little curious about beard-growing.
What is Snapchat ? For those of you not savvy enough to keep up with the changing pace of the newest social media, Snapchat is an app, which allows users to send temporary pictures. The idea is that you can … Read More
Slowly, a faint hissing sound began to rise. The girls let out nervous giggles and looked around, shaking and sweating (in the form of a singular, gigantic sweat drop forming on each of their absurdly tiny anime noses). The hissing became louder, and we saw a yellowish haze rising around them.
I am eight. It’s the holiday season, I am on winter break, and I am filled with bottomless guilt. My third-grade history textbook has disappeared—vanished somewhere in the bounds of our five hundred square foot portable modular building, immune to my powers of search.
I, a frustrated child of this generation, nursed on, yet never quite weaned off of Technology’s teat, decry the current state of Digital Communication.
I, however, find myself on that latter side of the argument, in the shunned group of speedwalkers. Until now I had always wondered, faintly bothered, why people rarely talk about how wonderful a fast walk is. I personally enjoy them immensely. The problem was I couldn’t really say why, or convince anyone else, without using reasons I found depressingly mundane for the wonderful act: “it saves time.” “Because I can wake up 10 minutes later that way…”
Before, she had felt as though of the night as a separate space—a sealed pocket of her life—but now she was reminded that everything that existed around the pool at daytime still stood by at night: the black hardtop of the basketball court, a racquetball wall, and the town Rec Center itself, a building which tomorrow would reveal to be little more than a grey dome without windows.