Who among us hasn’t fallen prey to the siren song of a group-coupon website? You, in the back, put your hand down, we’re being honest here. For my part, Living Social has introduced me to a few great and several adequate restaurants, a ton of new workout programs, and even a cooking class that my dad and I took together for Father’s Day one year, all of which provided the service I expected, and cost…
If this is not art, then nothing is art. If this is not art, then nothing is art. If this is not art, then nothing is art. RealCigReviews is a YouTube channel with over 1000 subscribers that has not posted a new video in more than a year. The channel's proprietor has reportedly quit. What remains, however, is a back catalog of more than 40 reviews by a group of teenage boys of different…
For most of my life I thought it was normal that Vladimir Nabokov's name was always ink-blue and ivory, that A is a lipstick-scarlet letter, that the word opium is the color of a pomegranate and N was the same brown as the word November. That a song could smell like tobacco and vetiver and bitter orange, a taste so thick that you could feel it smeared across your tongue. I thought that everyone saw…
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What middle-aged brother and sister who live off Old Highway 2 just past the four corners have been secretly adjusting the damper on their fireplace every time the other leaves the room for the last eight years? Sources report that heavy sighs and performative sweater-donning have reached an all-time high, and
The cockroaches crawling over the seats only marked the beginning of the twenty-plus hour hell about to commence. By the time the other students noticed the insects slowly emerging from the plush, reclining seats, it was too late to turn back. It was the summer after my freshman year of college, and I was in Indonesia with a professor and about fifteen students to interview government officials and NGO leaders about development of democracy and…
Let this be a testament to the power of the Stepmom. Let this story flex the frayed muscles of hope and faith. Let this be proof of the unseen strings that tether us together like wild marionettes in perpetual flail. But held, somehow, in some unearthly palm. I watched Boeings slam the World Trade Center in English class while still raw from an uprooting, a divorce, and a new woman in our lives. My parents’…
It was my fault. I invited vipers into my den. When it came time to send out invites to my 12th birthday party, I padded the list with my frenemy, Lindsey, and friends of friends like Lela and Rachel until I had as many guests as I now had years. Several of them probably resented spending their Sunday afternoon at the home of a girl they barely knew, but once the invites get sent out,…
This, the Toastiest piece ever written, is brought to you by our own Tia Baheri on behalf of Abigail, who really doesn't need more Navy in her closet this holiday season. It's 9PM on a Tuesday and I'm in a U-Haul cargo van with my two female-bodied romantic partners riding fifty minutes outside of Boston to look at the king-sized bed Victoria found on Craigslist that will hopefully, as Finn puts it, “withstand the…
This post brought to you by MyEvilTwin. The sixth graders were performing a hybrid version of The Nutcracker before Christmas break and the eighth graders, as basically the elder statesmen of the school, were going to help. Specifically, anyone with dance “training” was wanted to choreograph the various numbers. I’d had ballet lessons and wore pointe shoes, which apparently gained me enough cred to be assigned the finale - the “Waltz of the Flowers”…
Damn Your grandfather says this constantly. He’s a tall, stooped man with pale lips and a thick German accent, and the word comes out like he’s trying to cough something up. You’re six years old before you even realize it’s a word. You want to ask him what it means, but he scares you; he’s kind but he’s loud, and his motives are inscrutable. You find out in Sunday School (which you will attend until…
I’d like to think I got into selling pot with the best of intentions. I was a freshman in college and one of my friends had some weed he needed to sell to buy his books. Seeing as how it was at least a step closer to the right thing--he’d stolen his textbooks when he couldn't afford them the semester before--I figured I should too. I had worked in a cafeteria for a year before…
In retrospect, driving from Oakland to Texas without checking the weather report or taking time zones into account was foolhardy. This is why I am never on time to anything; every trip I plan always seems perfectly reasonable to me until someone else reacts to it. By then it's too late to change anything. "You can't drive from California to Austin," my dad said, after laughing so hard he started wheezing when I mentioned I…
Previous entries in the DUI series can be found here. Sara knew what she was doing. “The booze is gonna react with my pills, I bet,” she said in the passenger seat during the journey from Madison to Poynette. Her nonchalant spirit sparked a rumble of excitement behind my heart. This was my first and only high school teenage Can’t Hardly Wait house party. We were gonna get “WOO WOO FUCKINGGGGGGGG WASTED.”…
It’s a really weird story. I was beaten. Not like—well yes, like beaten. With a tire iron. I KNOW, RIGHT. I knew him, the guy who beat me. It wasn’t just some random person who ran in and smacked me around at 4 am. I live on the eighth floor. No, I was just noodling on my essay, and this guy comes in—I know him, kind of, not biblically, he’s this small boy who comes…
It’s a late summer night in Tokyo. On the streets of the Roppongi entertainment district, a man named Lucky is stopping groups of businessmen on the street and trying to hustle them into a strip club called Glamour. A tiny club the size of someone’s bedroom located on the penultimate floor of a building just off Roppongi’s main drag, you would only know about Glamour if you happened to work there or had been coaxed…
