Rohin Guha's previous work for The Toast can be found here. "[E]ven though I knew nothing about Peach in terms of stats or character besides her princess status, the mere fact that she offered me the chance to play through the game as a girl felt like such a novel idea that I picked her immediately." --Kate McCallister, "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Peach" When was I eight years old,…
From before I can remember to the beginning of my high school years, it was my family's tradition to go to Disney World for the week of Thanksgiving. It was the only vacation we took for the better part of my childhood, and we prided ourselves on our special insider knowledge as regular, annual visitors to Disney World. The crown jewel in our treasury of underloved “secret” attractions was Maelstrom: A High Seas Adventure.
Previously in Dead Pet Chronicles: A Fish Formerly Called Wanda. In fourth grade, I was the new student in school. While I liked many of my classmates, I felt shy when it came to having people over to my house or accepting birthday party invitations. Only by the very end of the year had I begun to feel like I made a couple friends, including a sweet, quiet, freckly girl named Meredith,…
The Toast's previous coverage of trans* issues can be found here.
It was my best friend, Anna, who I told first. That kind of friendship you have when you’re eleven – where you see each other all day at school, then rush straight to the telephone to call when you get home. ‘Do you ever feel like you were born into the wrong body?’ It was a genuine question – I
Some animals are capable of history. Some are not. Animals I've never witnessed looking back include spiders, snakes, and fish. The web is now. The prey is forward. The egg is back. I look back. The boy in Kentucky isn't happy or sad; he's working. He threads rainbow beads on black embroidery floss. He made the beads himself and baked them himself, and the house smells like a mixture of plastic and dough and hot…
When I was a girl, I dreamt, often, of putting my hand to my face and feeling the roughness of stubble. When I was an even younger girl, so young that I might have even been genderless, those years when all is permitted, no top at the beach, no difference between us (no, even then I was a girl), my father would let us shave with him. A puffy handful of Barbasol. My brother and…
Years ago, two friends sat across from me at their gleaming kitchen table and asked if I thought they should adopt a child. It might seem like a strange question to ask a fresh college graduate still years away from becoming a parent herself. But this couple happened to be weighing transracial adoption, and I was the only adopted person and one of very few people of color they knew. We had recently been introduced by…
It's 1998 in Finneytown, Ohio. I'm seven years old and treading water in the YMCA pool. So is my twin sister. The swim instructor, a blond, nondescript woman wearing one of those ugly block color bathing suits is standing at the edge of the pool. A few weeks later, she will save my life when I jump into the deep end, trying to impress my dad with my newly acquired swimming acumen. My
After we sealed up my maternal grandmother's ashes on that hot November day, I wondered what I actually knew about her, someone I'd only seen 6 times in my life. I thought about the category of grandmothers generally and how mine compared specifically.
Nakhon Ratchasima, also known as Khorat, is one of the North Eastern provinces. It's the place where my grandmother was born, grew up as the youngest of
Previous installments of Jaya Catches Up can be found here.
This book was everywhere in my elementary school classrooms, and I think the reason I didn’t read it is that I knew I would never say the title correctly. If someone asked me what I was reading I would have announced “The Messed Up Files of Mrs. Franken E. Hossenfeffer” or some
You love Don Draper, but at the same time you're glad patriarchy is dead. It was a tough fight, and when you watch Don Draper you can see that he understands this too— both the love, and the complicated gladness.
At patriarchy's funeral you were the one who laid a wreath on the coffin, and it was you who brought coffee to the grieving widows.
Previously in Dead Pet Chronicles: Aristotle the Turtle. “Are fish supposed to look like this?” My two roommates appeared by my side, our faces almost touching as we peered into the tank, so close our breath fogged the plastic. The three of us peered into the one-gallon tank on my dresser, full of neon pink rocks, a fake plant, a gray plastic castle, and a purple-maroon Betta, our beloved Wanda, the mascot of…
The world is a confusing place for children. At least, I assume--I don't know how all the children in the world view their circumstances, but I know it confused the hell out of me. There were too many rules, which would have made sense if they'd been related to anything I could understand as being important. You can't talk about any given subject for more than ten minutes, tops. You have to watch other
I think sometimes of all the bad things that could happen to me. Does anybody else do this? All the ways I could be hurt, the exact level and amount I could suffer, and survive.
It started, I think, in elementary school, while watching West Side Story with my parents. That scene where the Jets taunt Anita. Her shirt is fuchsia and her hair is short and her
