Whenever I’ve found someone passed out in a bathroom as a bartender, it’s because they’ve well exceeded their personal limit with alcohol. I also can’t help but think it’s because there’s been too little of something else.
Protecting each other from harm? Caring about one another even when it’s hard? Is it too corny to say that I’ll drink to that?
In other words, the suburbs are equated with whiteness because they were designed to be.
This right to return offered to Jews makes me think about who is entitled to join Europe and who is not.
If I approached my immigration experience the same way people approach a start-up, maybe I could optimize the amount of time it took me to integrate.
Like most people born just as the Cold War was ending, I learned about nuclear weapons in the past tense.
Integrating the personal with the professional was helpful in the chaos of 2020. But by 2021, I often lost track of whether I was a teacher or a therapist.
Here is my official statement on why I do most things alone: I am a lone wolf. I am comfortable with myself. Here is another explanation: There is something about me that is fundamentally unlikeable.
Maybe we are the coyotes. We’ve invaded those tidy realms of whiteness, and we did not duck our heads. We acted like we owned the place.
For many, our education in first-person writing begins with the college application essay, which rewards uplifting narratives with neat-bow conclusions. This is a bad thing.
Why not form friendship around a love of good drink, openness, and a desire to treat each other with fairness?
I have never been as vulnerable with students as I was then, having to tell the fifth graders I was in pain.
There’s a religious ring to the language of appreciating public lands in America. But, as a South Asian woman and a first-generation immigrant, I am not a welcome pilgrim.
Diners are affordable, accessible, and a staple of our national imagination. They’re also disappearing—and we need them now more than ever.
But there was also the feeling of home, and these feelings shiver still in my core.
I need the ocean to quiet my thoughts, the surfers to remind me I’m a person, the Taco Bell as a place where I become solid again.
Once it happens, sleep paralysis tends to recur. It’s as if a spirit has marked your bed, like the first coming has irreversibly altered you.
I was enjoying what exists of this place today—be it Croatia or Yugoslavia—without the need for comparison.
My husband’s grandfather wrote an immigration guide called “Before You Leave for America.” We could have used one in reverse—for moving to Bulgaria.
Frarieville was the safe space on which I could plant my flag.
