“Here’s my coat. Oh, and would you mind getting me a cup of coffee?” I took the client’s coat, staring at him but unable to think of a response. As an analyst at a management consulting firm, I had never been asked to handle either of those tasks. They usually fell to our (male) administrative assistant, but he was out sick, and I had met this client at the door, so he had delegated them to me...
The game of Scrabble involves players taking turns placing words on a singular board. It is slow paced, sometimes boring, and usually the person who knows the most words or ways to use obscure letters wins. Bananagrams is a little bit different. Players complete their own board, constantly racing against opponents to use all their letters first so they can grab another. It’s not about who can make the biggest words, but who can make the most out of the letters they have. You don’t need to memorize all the words which start with Q...
Any situation where you walk into a room of 400+ people is daunting, but walking into aroom of 400 strangers that you will be spending a whole week with was, for me, unimaginable. When I first got to Massachusetts Girls State at Stonehill College, I was overwhelmed by the unknowns. Who would my roommate be? Will I make friends? The unanswered questions were endless...
Four Oreos. Not three, not five, four. Oreos are something I know well. My little brother Bobby has always eaten four. It’s his snack in the morning, in the afternoon, and again at night. Why just four? What if there are only three left in the pack? Even if offered more, Bobby will only eat four Oreos...
All I could do was watch. I watched the speakers eloquently voice out their opinions. Iwatched the professor steer the conversation. Normally, when you come to class without having read the assigned chapter, or any chapter in the book, for that matter, you get lost in the discussion. That’s not how I felt then...
I heard a piercing noise as a plate of glass shattered and immediately felt like an idiot. I had been meticulously assembling the fragile dye-sensitized solar cells for four hours, making sure to measure the liquid semiconductor’s ingredients precisely, creating a smooth and even semiconductor, cutting a one-square-centimeter window for light to hit, measuring out an electrolyte solution to donate electrons, and I had been doing it perfectly. It was my third day at the Mark Balboa Institute for Green Chemistry (MBIGC), and I was finally at work making solar cells...
I’m accustomed to ruined clothing. Despite my efforts, there is no avoiding the drops of pigment that accumulate as I paint. It’s frustrating, certainly, but also oddly comforting. These splashes of color running across my favorite t-shirts and down the legs of my jeans are small markers of my experience as an artist. They are the haphazard artifacts revealing the history of my creative practice. Subtly, persistently, they remind me of where I’ve been as a maker...
Just before 11:30 PM, it happens. Time begins to slow down, creeping through its hourglass like honey. My vision becomes blurry as the book before me turns mysteriously incomprehensible. My eyelids droop, and I find myself reading the same sentence over and over again. And that’s when I know it’s time. Impatiently, I brush my teeth and extinguish the now unwelcome glow of my laptop. Finally, I switch on my radio and fan, and at long last clamber into my warm, personal haven...
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