The air shifted. Some smiled with relief, others looked away. In that moment, I realized what the “model minority” concept protects is not me, but the comfort of those around me. Politeness asks us to trade particularity for harmony, difference for calm.
For a moment, I caught myself thinking: this dancefloor is the happiest place on earth. Not in the saccharine way Disney markets happiness, but in the way fugitive joy exists—imperfect, defiant, and fleeting. The kind of happiness that knows how precarious it is and yet insists on itself anyway.
Should we not be grateful that companies care enough to hire skilled graphic designers educated in the ways of soft-selling via design and color, and not the bark of street hawkers?
Cicero: “An enormous house is often a discredit to the owner, if there is an emptiness about the place.”
When I defended likability, I sounded, even to my own ears, naïve.
(Photo by Marcus Loke via Unsplash) People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their…
Roasting different vegetables on a shared baking sheet, for example, requires some sensitivity and planning. How dense, how hydrated, how sweet, how easily burned is each one? Which one has an aggressive nature; which is mild? How much time does each require to become the best version of itself?
Somehow I had come to think of the Bible as stuck together from the start, a sacred, ordained book on which we speak our oaths...
For eighteen years, I have been returning home, sliding that brass key into the lock, and stepping into comfort. Now I tense before I even try.
It was the kind of area where my incomplete understanding, which should mean comedy, became not tragedy, not emptiness or absence, but presence without meaning.