The Avocado and Me

Life seems to me more of a maze than a line. There are long, unremarkable stretches of time, and then suddenly, you're in a corner - a pocket, if you will, of memory so vivid you can close your eyes and be there. Be ten again, at the fifth grade Christmas party, frosting cookies the frazzled PTO moms made (read: picked up at Target). Be three, at a little shop in Boston with erasers the shape of cakes. Twelve, doing the dishes to Bon Iver; two, "reading" The Cat in the Hat; sixteen, eating brussel sprouts in the choir room. I have pockets of memory I haven't experienced yet, and pockets that won't be filled. This is how to know people: stand by for their stretches, be there to see their pockets. I enjoy observing people. This is how I act. Acting is interesting, because so many people do it for so many reasons - some for escapism, some to better understand the world around them. I act to learn about other people. I act to disappear into another lived experience. T...

Alpha Cohorts. That's what they're calling the groups of students allowed to attend in-person school. I am in Alpha Cohort A-K. Tuesdays and Wednesdays will belong to us.  We will be screened upon entering, cotton strings sewed tight through smiles, aisles, elastic, lanes, stops and go's. My last handshake was with the English coordinator. The last place I went mask-less was Barnes and Noble, and of all things, I bought 1Q84 . A dystopia chronicling how a fictional year exists in parallel with a real one. Plastic shields, and everything will smell like bleach//latex//alcohol, and it is here, in this miniature of the big wide world, that we will grow. If it all seems a little surreal, it's because it is. This is the merging of a fictional year and a real one, and I'm quite curious as to what Murakami thinks about it.  One thing I'm excited about is the inevitability of what I like to call a Capulet-Montague complex. It's high school, after all, so naturally t...

Not in books. In books, it's important. See, books are woven words (shocker), but those words don't exist on one plane; they work in harmony to knit a picture. They construct dimensions, and allow the reader to view a story through the framework of their own life. Dialogue is personal there. Not in conversations - those are good. Especially the sticky ones where you say the opposite of what you mean. Dialogue is real there. I'm talking movies. Television. Short film applications for really expensive schools in California. I hate dialogue, generally, but voice-overs are the greatest offenders. Ugh. I hate a voice-over because authenticity and realness go down the drain. There is no way Jennifer Aniston's inner-voice uses the term 'prebiotic oat.' Actually, scratch that last. Don't think me pretentious, please, because I know it sounds that way: but I think voice-overs are lazy. That doesn't mean I won't use them, because I'm certain I...