Growing up, I never had chicken nuggets or frozen pizza for dinner. Instead, there was a fresh, home-cooked Persian meal in front of me each night––and looking back, I was extremely unappreciative of it. As I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate that the love of somebody labouring[Read More…]
Off the Board
God, it’s brutal out here
As a third-year student, I feel like I should have this whole “university lifestyle” thing figured out. This year, however, I am living on my own for the very first time and at times feel as lost as I did in my first. I am someone who needs personal space[Read More…]
Grappling with my love for misogynistic rap
On the train home a few weeks ago, I was about to pop on my headphones and listen to Kendrick Lamar when I overheard a conversation between two young white girls discussing their music taste. “I don’t understand how you can listen to rap,” one of the girls said. “All[Read More…]
Let your unconscious dance
I often wake up and wholeheartedly believe I am still dreaming. The scenes in my slumber world and my reality meet and intertwine, carrying the affect of my dream into the start of my day. Sometimes, I am 50 feet tall and walking for miles down unrecognizable roads; other times,[Read More…]
Finding new words for my identity
It took me until I was 12 to realize that my father’s English was accented. Before that, it was just my father’s voice: Familiar and melodic, a vestige of his first, tonal language. Like many mixed kids, I was hyper-aware of the racial categories I fit into from a young[Read More…]
‘Where We Were’: From reality to memory
This summer, McGill’s Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre, a student-run, anglophone theatre company affiliated with McGill’s English department, screened the short film Where We Were. The film feels reminiscent of the COVID-19 outbreak as the story makes connections between how people process memories of large-scale catastrophes and our current reality. This[Read More…]
The significance of silence
Recently I drove two and a half hours to visit a long-time friend. Coming from different childhood backgrounds, and following similarly disparate pathways of life, our perspectives mesh and reinvigorate in surprising, and rewarding, ways. As my rickety Subaru accelerated its way north along Lake Superior’s rural coastline, we, too,[Read More…]
Stop trying to make ‘cheugy’ happen
On March 30, a TikTok user posted about a made-up word she and her friends use to describe things that encapsulate millennial, girlboss, out-of-style energy: Cheugy. Since then, gen-Z-ers have embraced the term, making TikToks and other social media posts about certain cheugy staples––think minions, millennial pink, graphic T-shirts, Rae[Read More…]
Music as a way of remembering
People listen to music for three distinct purposes: To escape from their thoughts, change their mindset, or use as a narrative medium—something that can speak to one’s physical and mental situation first-hand. There is a time and place for each of these ways of listening to music: I will put[Read More…]
I could sleep wherever I lay my head
During my undergraduate degree, I became a night-owl: The day was occupied by class or work, and I allotted my most academically and socially productive moments to the witching hours. Although I could never predict where I would sleep each night, I always found a place to rest if I[Read More…]
