Unless your childhood was a mundane mix of mild manners and perfect parenting you probably read the infamous, Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorsts, somewhere between wetting the bed and fourth grade.  I could delve into details of the prizes his brothers found in their cereal bowls that morning and what Alexander found instead,(nothing), but from the title the underlying nature of the story is apparent.  As adults without bed times and with the ability to buy ourselves a cookie, we at leastRead More

Middle grounds and in-betweens—where boundaries are blurred, expectations are muddled, and nothing is really satisfied. Let’s start with the basics.   2% milk: it doesn’t have the creaminess of whole milk, but it isn’t the health conscious choice of skim milk. Diet soda: it’s ultimately still soda, and by default unhealthy. But it tries to compromise with a lower calorie count and a poser for sugar? B’s: the mutant hybrid between effort and indifference—the love child of half-heartedness. With just a step further in effort, there was the potential toRead More

World renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow once ordered all our needs into a rigid pyramid of importance. As Maslow argued, at the base of all our needs is what keeps us physically alive as human beings. As the pyramid narrows toward the top, meeting physiological needs transitions toward meeting more internal, emotional needs. He deemed this to be what founds a “stable” individual. However, is it true in every moment that we put our physical “needs” before what we mentally desire? Can Maslow’s rigidity ever flex? I don’t want to believeRead More

I come from a long line of proud, Chinese-born and Chinese-raised relatives, but I am the first one to be born in the United States. Despite living in a suburban Bostonian home, I was raised on scallion pancakes and rice, torturous Chinese lessons every Saturday, and stereotypical Asian values. Every dinner was a lecture about how fortunate I was not live in a poverty-stricken communist country. Grades were always held as a number one priority, even before health and sanity. My Chinese school and group of family friends were alwaysRead More

  Record 6: Silver Lake, California, Tuesday, July 5th, 2011. Day. You start the day at Casbah with a shot of espresso, half a cigarette, and an Adderall. Today, you’re 26, you remember. You’re on the wrong side of 20, and your Facebook friends don’t care what you did last night. Not anymore. The barista is your friend. Her name is Ashby. She knows it’s your birthday. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s a bad friend. “You want something else?” She asks you, and you realize you’re standing at theRead More

In honor of father’s day this past weekend, I spent some time reflecting on the invaluable lessons you have taught me in a quarter century.  You have owned some version of a beard or a mustache for nearly my whole life, which admittedly and Freudian-ly may be why I am only attracted to men with some sort of facial fur.  You posses the innate ability to tell a joke with such sincerity that you gain instant belief from your victims.  You have never been known to turn down a drink with the onesRead More

I work at a job that requires some customer service, most of which is done over the phone. Being a 22-year-old, I already have a strong aversion to the phone. Why would I want to actually talk to another human when I could just go on my computer and not have to interact with anyone? #ShitIDontUnderstand So yeah I don’t love answering the phone from the get-go, mostly because it makes me extremely anxious. What can I say, my mom always told me not to talk to strangers. But someRead More

  Record 5: Venice, California, Sunday July 5th, 2009. Day. So like Reed and I got to the Whaler a few hours (yeah, fucking hours) before his mom even called us. She texted me earlier, which seems weird, but she always texts me when Reed doesn’t answer his phone or leaves it on silent. Her text said: TELL MY SON TO TEXT ME K? So I told Reed to text her a few hours later when he woke up. It was around 1:35 in the afternoon. I remember because IRead More

Some people go through life blissfully ignorant of all the horrible, disgusting germs that are literally everywhere. Other people carry the burden of constant fear, paranoia, and revulsion from living in a world contaminated by germs. These people are called Germaphobes. Germaphobes are faced with many challenges on a daily basis, as their phobia robs them of the joys that non-Germaphobes get to experience, such as…   Ball pits Ah, Ball pits. Ball pits are a childhood staple of seemingly innocent fun. Wrong! Ball pits are full of heinous germsRead More

I’ve always been the person who thinks that if pictures of your drinks for the night, memorable club snaps, and smoking photos make you happy, go ahead and post them. But I’m not a smoker or a drinker, or even a promiscuous model, so when I was messaged this weekend to take down my picture from Instagram, I was extremely confused. My picture was of a messenger bag. With the HypoPARA Association logo on it. The HypoPARA Assoc. is an association that holds annual conferences and distributes countless amounts ofRead More

Allyson came to visit Kelsey in good old SL,UT for a weekend of sisterly bonding and brawling,  this time sans bearded boyfriends that drive like 80 year old ladies.  What follows is a collaborative account between sisters.   We arrived in Salt Lake at the Howard Johnson Express Inn with low expectations. This was fortunate because our hotel looked like an abandoned building with resident roaches and rodents. The HJ was rough and good-enough, but nothing more if we were to be honest with ourselves. Our first room was streetRead More

It began in first grade when the discovery of a substitute teacher greeting the class in the morning distressed me so much that I begged my mother, through snot and salinized skin, to take me home from school. My threshold for the substitute teacher’s performance being less than perfect in mirroring my own teacher’s routine absolutely shattered me. I was sort of a high-strung child, you might declare. Thankfully, years later, there is nothing that warrants this exact reaction from me, except, perhaps, intense moments of hunger. Childhood anxiety isRead More