This Much I Know is True: One step at a time
I have an old pair of Brooks running shoes that I can’t seem to get rid of. I got them the fall of my freshman year with money I saved up from tips while working at a frozen yogurt shop. I gave a lot of free samples and smiled way too hard at customers, but eventually I earned enough to pay for these shoes that would become my prized possession. As a child I was active, but was diagnosed with exercise induced asthma. That meant swimming, jumping on the trampoline and especially running made me winded and caused my chest to feel tight and shallow. Because of this, I never could run very far. The summer before I came to college I wanted this to change. I decided I wanted to become a runner. I bought a pair of...
Read MoreTo go abroad is to live a little deeper
I always knew I wanted to study abroad, but I never knew it was possible for me. During Christmas time, my family would receive holiday update letters. In them, family friends would always mention how their daughter or son was coming home for the holidays after a semester in Cambodia or Italy. As “braggy” as it sounded, I secretly wanted to do the same. I wanted to get out of Tennessee, out of American day to day living and see what it the air smelled like, how the stars and moon looked in a new and different place. I tried to talk my parents into a semester exchange to a Central or Latin American country, but that was about as effective as talking to a brick wall fortified with solid-steel mortar. I took Spanish for 3 years in high...
Read MorePepsi pulls ad after controversy goes viral
On April 5, Pepsi pulled a two-and-a-half-minute commercial that caused controversy due to its tone-deaf attitude towards the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality. The commercial aimed to “reflect people from different walks of life coming together in a spirit of harmony,” according to Pepsi. The commercial begins by showing a man of Asian descent playing cello on a rooftop and then cuts to a woman wearing a hijab organizing photos on a table. Quickly after this, the viewer gets a brief glimpse of a generic protest happening in the background of Kendall Jenner’s photo shoot. After noticing the protest, the man with the cello and the woman wearing the hijab join the protest. The man with the cello makes eye contact with Jenner and persuades her with a simple head nod to join the movement. The protest...
Read MoreMissing from our screens
If you receive your news through social media, you may have read an alarming headline: “14 girls have gone missing in D.C. in the last 24 hours.” While this has been debunked by various sources, I couldn’t help but notice a startling uptick in images of missing girls. At first, I assumed I was receiving these updates because I follow people based in D.C., but then people from other parts of the country began expressing concern. The girls, all in their teens, had gone missing since the beginning of the year to very little fanfare. I began to wonder how so many teenaged girls living in the nation’s capital could go missing without it being on the news. With the recent awareness of human trafficking within the country’s borders, one would assume that a high number of missing girls...
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Impoverished Politics: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
I was struggling this week to figure out what to write about, and then Assad dropped chemical weapons on Syrian civilians. And then Trump bombed a Syrian air-base in response. I found myself reacting the way I always do: skeptically, angrily and helplessly. A few years of history, culture and politics classes have taught me that United States’ aggression and involvement in other regions often does a better job of further destabilizing situations than helping them. The current state of the Middle East is part of our legacy as a modern empire. When the news of dozens of US tomahawk missiles being rained down on Syria made its way to me, the anti-war, anti-military ideologue within me was shocked and livid. In the past Trump has condemned further aggression in Syria, and now here we are. The problem is,...
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This much I know is true: God feels like love
“I love you so much it hurts.” This is one of my favorite expressions and I know exactly when I feel it. Usually, for Thanksgiving, my family and I make the long and corn-filled drive to West Lafayette, Indiana to see my aunt and uncle. The trip is one of the closest experiences of Hell I can attest to in my lifetime: the scenery is bleak and the sky seems only to get bigger and greyer as we get closer to the destination. But my light suffering is worth it when we finally pull up to the house and my aunt is waiting for us, peaking through the glass door. Everybody runs to one another and the mood feels so special. And we all hug like we think we will never see one another again– the squishy, hard to...
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