No Snow and Bad Wine

By Westly Joseph

Art by Jessie Sheldon

When I found out I was attending the 2018 annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Katowice, Poland, my key goal was to learn as much as possible about Small Island Developing States (SIDS). A 2002 study estimated that over 200 million people will be displaced due to climate change. I found this statistic shocking and felt the need to educate myself further, and learn what role I could play in combating the issue.

The conference itself took place in a space that felt like an airport, white walls and no windows, constructed purely for the purpose of hosting the conference. As I picked up my ID badge and walked through security, I noticed the large letters spelling out “Welcome to Poland,” displayed front and center. The second thing I noticed were the endless piles of paper behind a desk named “Documents Distribution.”

Throughout the two-week-long conference, I began to observe more and more how unsustainable the most important gathering on climate change in the world actually was. Disposable cups. Single use silverware. Plastic water bottles. No composting. Very few vegetarian or vegan options. The list went on and on.

Every evening as I left the conference center to take a tram back to the hostel, the sight of smog and the smell of burning coal would remind me that not only was the event creating a ton of material waste, it was also being powered by coal. The conference would eventually teach me to notice the nuances that exist within the effort to combat climate change—that sometimes we cannot see the problem, even when it’s right in front of us.

At the conference, there were almost 30,000 registered participants from all over the world representing hundreds of different delegations, from countries, to NGOs, to institutions like CC. While the participants are ideally supposed to represent the world population, I felt like I was at a European Union conference rather than a United Nations conference.

Many of the other participants shared these frustrations, as well as those expressed earlier, including CC Junior Paige Shetty (Colorado College junior), who told me, “Leaders at the conference continued to emphasize the urgency of the crisis, yet almost everyone who attended the conference had flown on a plane. These same people likely knew that one air-mile produces, on average, 53.3 lbs of carbon dioxide. Additionally, the venue itself was built specifically for this conference and would be taken down at its conclusion, only for another large venue to be built somewhere else for next year’s conference. How can we expect countries to reduce their emissions when the leading conference for climate change is not a model for sustainability?”

From 10 a.m to 8 p.m every day except Sunday, there would be dozens of events running at once that anyone with a conference badge could attend. Al Gore led an event called, “The Climate Crisis and its Solutions,” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hosted an event titled “Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS)— Regional Perspectives on the 1.5º Special Report,” and the government of Fiji and NAP Global Network ran an event called “Launch of Fiji’s First National Adaptation Plan.” There was a lot to learn and definitely not enough time.

One evening I attended an event called “Bordeaux 2050.” Bordeaux 2050 is a wine from the future that gives us the bitter taste of global warming. The premise of the wine event was a warning: the Bordeaux wine region in France is at risk to severe conditions of climate change, and by 2050, Bordeaux grapes may lose their rich and wonderful taste. “Despite the fact that global warming is a reality, many feel that it is a distant, abstract problem. So the French Association of Journalists for the Environment decided to give the French people tangible proof of climate change by hitting them where it hurts the most: wine, of course,” The French Association of Journalists for the Environment wrote. They partnered with researchers, scientists, and wine experts (like Excell Laboratory, France), to study the 30 year projections of current climate data and to create a wine that simulates the taste of a Bordeaux wine grown in 2050.

Each of the wine tasters swirled their glasses, smelled the wine, and took a sip. Reactions ranged from excitement about the idea itself, to shock and disgust. Some called it flat and non-complex, others called it sour, the general consensus amongst everyone, however, was that the wine did not taste nearly as good as the Bordeaux wine people from all over the world know and love today.

On the Bordeaux 2050 website, the homepage reads:

Bordeaux 2050

The Real Taste of Global Warming 

Do you know someone who still believes global warming isn’t real? Your pro-Trump uncle or that weird colleague you avoid at lunch? Fill in their details and we’ll send them a bottle of Bordeaux 2050.

If you choose to send a bottle of Bordeaux 2050 to someone, their suggested message is “Dear Climate Sceptic, here is a bottle of Bordeaux 2050, a wine straight from the future. It will give you a bitter taste of global warming … but please, keep your glass half full. Very warm wishes.” I sent one to Donald Trump … wishful thinking, I know.

After attending this event and doing more research on Bordeaux 2050, I was inspired by the work that the French Association of Journalists for the Environment had done. They took something that many people (especially the French) love and tangibly showed how climate change will affect it. They are making people think, “What would France be without really good wine?” Brilliant.

Given the excitement and chatter in the room after the event, I imagined these people going home to share the story of the wine tasting with their families and friends. I then started thinking about how I could use this method to encourage people to really pay attention to the impacts of climate change in Colorado. Is there something that Coloradans care about as much as the French care about wine? The outdoors, of course! What would Colorado look like without skiing and snowboarding? Recent statistics show that 71% of Colorado residents participate in outdoor recreation each year, and this doesn’t even include visitors that travel to Colorado.

A huge sector of the outdoor recreation industry in Colorado is skiing. In 2015, Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA) and Vail Resorts, announced the findings of a new economic impact study on Colorado’s ski and snowboarding industry. As the leading ski state in North America, Colorado’s ski industry generates $4.8 billion annually. However, if ambitious climate action is not taken soon enough, skiing in Colorado, as we know it, will be gone.

Several reports and studies have come out over the years projecting the impact of climate change on skiing in Colorado if emissions do not decrease. Here are a few of the many shocking possible outcomes evaluated through different studies:

1.     Summit County can expect late 21st century winters to feel about 10ºF warmer with 25% fewer average annual days at or below 32ºF. This means that the ski season will be shortened by about 1 month by the end of the century.

2.     High greenhouse gas emissions scenarios (continuing to emit at the exponential rate we are currently emitting at) are likely to end skiing in Aspen by 2100, and possibly well before then, while low emission path scenarios (reducing current emissions) preserve skiing at mid-to-upper mountain elevations. In either case, snow conditions will deteriorate in the future.

3.     EPA projections estimate that many Colorado Ski resorts could see winter seasons shortened by up to 80% by 2090. This not only impacts skiing but also impacts the state’s water resources.

 Regardless of which prediction comes true, each outcome proves dim. I hope that these statistics leave a bad taste in your mouth the way that Bourdeaux 2050 did for those who attended the conference.

To get a different perspective on the issue than my own and that of academic literature, I interviewed CC sophomore and avid skier Amy Raymond. Amy grew up in Centennial, CO and has been skiing for around 15 years. Last year (2017-2018), she skied 52 days. For Amy, skiing is a priority.

When I showed Amy the statistics predicticting less snowfall and a shorter ski season, Amy said, “This makes me feel really sad for a few reasons: one is that climate change is negatively impacting and kind of destroying this sport that I love. I dream of being an old retired woman on a chairlift who skis an unreasonable amount and makes friends with young people on the chairlift and this dream is honestly looking kind of impossible … Also, skiing is already so monetarily inaccessible for a lot of people, and a shortened ski season will only make skiing more inaccessible.”

Although Amy is saddened by these statistics, she is not surprised: “Comparing my winters as a kid in Colorado versus now, it’s pretty obvious we’re getting less precipitation and higher temperatures. It makes me feel sort of hopeless and definitely complicit. Skiing is honestly a pretty unsustainable sport that’s bad for surrounding environments and the environment at large, but odds are I’m not going to stop skiing anytime soon, so I’m part of the problem, which is very true but still sucks to acknowledge.” After speaking with Amy I realized how my intuition proved true; these statistics were especially upsetting to Colorado skiers.

What can skiers do in this dismal and contradictory situation? I decided to reach out to the Director of Planning and Sustainability for Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Matt Feier, to get his expert opinion on the matter.

Matt explained how Crested Butte was preparing for this predicted decrease in snowfall and expected shortening of the ski season. He said, “There is widespread acknowledgement in the industry that we need to remain nimble and adaptable to change, and that we all may need to consider other business models and revenue streams in order to remain successful.”

Thanks to input from Matt and Amy, I have come up with a list of things that people who ski and ride can do to help combat climate change in Colorado. 

1.     Pressure ski resorts to pursue sustainable practices and only ski and ride at resorts that acknowledge climate change and are actively doing something to combat it.

2.     Vote for those who are passionate about climate action.

3.     Offset your own carbon footprint from traveling to and from the mountains. Check out the Colorado Carbon Fund, a local non profit dedicated to decreasing carbon emissions, to learn more.

4.     Pressure gear companies to pursue sustainable practices and consider only purchasing new gear from companies that have sustainable practices (i.e. Phunkshunwear, Zeal Optics, Picture Organic Clothing, GrassSticks, Meier Skis, and Capita Snowboards).

5.     Donate to organizations that are doing conservation and sustainable activism work. Protect Our Winters (POW) is a great organization specifically focused on climate activism for winter lovers.

While these statistics are jarring, they are only a starting point: we have to start with what we love and grow to make bigger change from there. I wanted something more personal to catch people’s attention and get them to care, like Bordeaux 2050 does. Watching massive flooding and forest fires destroy our nation and the rest of the world on television and on our phones, it’s easy to become distanced. We do not feel the immediate impacts, so how do we know where to take action? The first thing that came to mind was art: visuals are a great way to get people to think and care about something that they otherwise wouldn’t have, like bringing awareness to the bottle of wine that sits on the dinner table every night. We can use our experience with wine and skiing as a means of connecting with the greater issue of climate change, something that can feel distant and thus paralyzing.

The art you saw at the beginning of this article, and might have seen around campus, is meant to get ordinary people like you and me to care about climate change, and most importantly, to start acting. It is easy to become complacent when we hear about climate change all the time, but if I took anything away from the conference in Poland, it is that climate change is the biggest and most urgent problem that humanity is facing. We all need to be doing our part if we want widespread change to happen.

For years, scientists and reporters have been sharing the facts behind climate change, but clearly, statistics are not always enough. Apparently, it is not enough for us to be told that islands are going underwater and millions of people are being displaced, or to hear about people dying due to an extreme weather event. So what is enough? What motivates us to recognize the change that needs to be made? For those at the Bordeaux 2050 event, it was wine. For many Coloradans, it’s skiing. The United Nations Climate Change Conference left me with a strong desire to get people to care and act, by contextualizing climate change into something tangible.

Blue Issue | February 2019

Paintings for the Temple

For six months over the course of 2018 and 2019, the Guggenheim museum in New York is forfeiting its promotion of the self-serving male titans of the art world. In those six months, it hosts a temple built by a woman to honor her spiritual masters.

Walking into the museum (or rather, the temple) is overwhelming. The first room of the exhibit urgently plunges you into an outlandish world with a series of staggering 10-foot-tall paintings, each richly saturated with oranges, blues, and purples. Spirals and interlocking circles surge and gush over the massive sheets of paper, forming an illegible cursive. The rest of the exhibit follows a similar thread—vibrant colors fill every corner, and every work seems to communicate something mysterious with a language of diagrammatic, letter-like symbols.

 ———

The temple was created by Hilma af Klint, an artist born in 1862, just a few decades before artists like Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian created their most iconic works. A talented landscape and portrait artist, Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts awarded af Klint her own studio upon her graduation. She achieved a respectable amount of success completing commissions from wealthy patrons for traditional subjects like portraits of their wives and children. When she wasn’t supporting herself with commissions, however, unbeknownst to most of the world, af Klint was creating some of the most revolutionary paintings of the 20th century.

At the age of 17, af Klint became interested in spiritualism, or the belief in the possibility of communication with the spirits of the dead and of deities. Her interest may have been sparked by the passing of her 10-year-old sister, whom af Klint took care of as she died of pneumonia. However, af Klint’s interest in spiritual communication quickly turned to contact with deities, all-knowing spirits that she would later call the High Masters. Within a few years, she had mastered the art of divine communication, and spent the rest of her life frequently communing with these spirits.

Spiritualism was a common interest for upper-class Europeans in the late 19th century, and seances (rituals used to contact unearthly spirits) were generally not taken as lightly as they are today. The contemporary scientific discoveries of subatomic particles and x-rays were proof that the world contained things beyond those that are visible and immediately apparent. People interested in spiritualism at the time were simply inspired by those discoveries to seek new ways to understand the natural world.

Almost a decade after af Klint’s initial dive into the world of spiritualism, she created a group with four other female spiritualists called De Fem, or The Five. Together, the women would seek to enter trance-like states to perform intricate seances, communing with the all-knowing High Masters.

The process of these seances, though somewhat unknown to history, went a bit like this: the five women would sit around a table, their altar close at hand. The contents of the altar were surprisingly Christian—a crucifix was boldly placed front and center and an ornately framed depiction of Jesus was hung above it. The small altar stand was covered in a luxuriously embroidered white cloth and was laden with vines, palm fronds, peonies, and roses. On either side of the cross were two white candles melted over their elaborate candle holders. The altar reflected The Five’s spiritual interests: aside from their more occult religious beliefs, all of them were practicing Lutherans, hence the Christian imagery. The group was also deeply interested in understanding nature, so they adorned their sacred space with pieces of it.

Once the altar was prepared and the women seated, they would begin their contact with the High Masters. It’s unclear how they would summon these spirits—however, we do know that their process of communication relied on automatic drawing.

Automatic drawing, a technique made famous by surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí, is the process of clearing one’s mind completely and drawing without intention or control over what’s being drawn. For The Five, this type of drawing allowed them to communicate with the High Masters. When The Five sat for their seance, it was as if the person drawing relinquished her own consciousness and allowed her body to be occupied by the spirit, who would use her body as a conduit for communication. The resulting works were chaotic, abstract pencil sketches. Over time, af Klint and The Five developed a sort of dictionary of symbolic images that they could use to interpret the drawings and understand what they were describing about the natural world.

After 10 years of regular seances, the High Masters came to The Five with a commission: they wanted them to create a series of paintings diagramming the universe to be installed in a temple. One by one the women declined, worried that they would go mad from such extended contact with the spirit world. Af Klint, however, was unafraid, so she accepted. She would spend the next 10 years creating a series of 193 paintings called The Paintings for the Temple. The series describes everything from the origin of the universe to evolution to the contrast and conflation of the masculine and feminine.

All the while, she kept her project almost entirely a secret, relegating her works to her small, isolated cottage in Sweden and showing them to very few people. Though she no longer created automatic drawings, all of the works for the temple were guided by the knowledge she gained from the spirits she worshipped.

——— 

Hilma af Klint began to create her stunning abstract works in 1905, years before revolutionary male artists like Wassily Kandinsky had their breakthroughs. This fact is undeniably exciting—it’s incredible to realize that a woman beat them to the punch. However, what’s really radical and subversive is the fact that af Klint’s motive for creating her works was so distinct from that of her male counterparts. While the long-acclaimed male artists ventured into abstraction for the sake of radicalism and personal achievement, af Klint did so out of pious selflessness. For af Klint, art was not simply an exciting experimentation to show off to the art world and garner her acclaim, like it was for most contemporary artists. Af Klint’s artwork was her life’s duty—she created it because she cared so deeply about her metaphysical commissioners. Her work was a demonstration of her love and respect.

In her article “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” Carol Duncan explains that the popular conception of art history’s progression is one of metaphorical patricide, or father-killing. In this patricidal narrative, artists achieve recognition because they did something better, more innovative than their forefathers. For example, cubists like Picasso became acclaimed because they thought of three-dimensional space differently than artists had before. These patricidal artists’ success is rooted in a millennia-long competition to one-up their predecessors. This narrative almost always excludes women, people of color, and anyone seen as inferior to the white men who are established as great artists. It allows us to incorrectly assume that underprivileged groups historically didn’t have the flourishing creative production that they did.

Hilma af Klint and the recent recognition of her work’s value deeply upset this narrative. Unlike most artists of the time, she didn’t create work for the sake of display or profit. In fact, she only displayed her spiritual works once during her lifetime, when she brought a small number of her pieces to a spiritualist convention. She even mandated that her works not be displayed until 20 years after her death, a decision that surely saved her from severe criticism and allowed her to continue her mission undisturbed. Because she kept her work so secretive, we can easily assume that she didn’t intend for her art to be forced into the aggressive and toxically masculine context that most well-known art is. By looking at af Klint and other artists like her, we can begin to unravel misconceptions about artistic beauty and innovation that are rooted in pointless rivalry and self-aggrandizing.

Critics attribute af Klint’s invention of radical abstraction to her spiritual guidance, and I’m sure she would agree with them. However, this attribution becomes problematic in terms of af Klint’s authority and individualism. It’s easy to write her out of her own work, to claim that because she worked with strong guidance from her deities, she doesn’t deserve full credit for her art.

But what’s the big deal about individualism and intention? We only value individuality and originality in art because of the dominating patricidal narrative and because of our misconception that an artist has to be some kind of independent, revolutionary genius for their work to be valuable. Af Klint didn’t think of herself as working independently, but that doesn’t make her work any less moving.

 ———

At the end of the long walk up the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramp (which, with its distinctive roundness, looks wonderfully similar to af Klint’s unexecuted plans for her own structure), you reach the temple’s altar. In the altar, there are three paintings, the two on either side depicting something like steps rising to and from the horizon, the one in the middle holding a massive gold orb that almost seems to vibrate with energy. The complex symbols likely translate into some sort of prayer, though most onlookers can’t understand what it says. You don’t have to. These paintings weren’t made for you to evaluate their meaning or worth. You’re allowed to just look and appreciate how beautiful the piece is. Perhaps for the first time in a large museum, the artist isn’t obligating you to understand their own importance. You can relax and enjoy the beauty of Hilma’s divine world.

Blue Issue | February 2019

Family Ties and American Lies

A not-so-fun fact about me: my relationship with my family is centered around my achievements. Or, rather, the lack thereof—at least that’s my perception of their perception of me. From where they seem to stand, I’m nothing special: I attend an okay college and have a roughly average range of interests; I don’t put nearly enough pressure on myself, and thus underperform academically. I am more interested in the world of emotional experience and personal pleasure than I am in money or success.

If you think the above paragraph paints my family as jerks, you should know that they grew up in the Soviet Union. Food was not always a given, and the education people received from the state was, for the large majority, skill-oriented. If you ever saw a mental health professional of any kind (though the ones in the USSR were unlikely to resemble anyone you’re familiar with), your chances of getting a job were close to none. My family’s upbringing placed them an ocean away from the West and its values. An ocean is a long way to swim.

Still, their perception has motivated me to advance myself with as little help from them as possible, to become financially and socially independent in order to reject a set of cultural values I find conflicting. My desire to achieve without them is hypocritical: they have already helped me by being white, wealthy, and willing to invest in my education—or, rather, invest in me as a sort of business, which they eventually hope to get returns on. Their expectation of me is that I’ll earn enough money to support them, and anybody else in our family’s “in-group.” Those on the outside—meaning those who aren’t already wealthy, secure, and well-connected—are not their concern. For my family, capitalism is the only functional system, which is understandable since they were forced to live through perhaps the most well-known failure of socialism. Even within this socialist system, the underground market flourished, and it's their familial privilege that has continued to allow them to become financially successful—a fact that they fail to acknowledge.

I can’t help but fixate on this, but at the same time I want to resist it: it feels unfair to have my birth predetermine my success. Capitalism teaches me to use my circumstance to my advantage, while everything I’ve learned since beginning to deconstruct the values I inherited from my family teaches me to hate capitalism. If I don’t take advantage of my social position, capitalist ideology tells me I will end up broke and unfulfilled, since I won’t have the resources that I’ll need to do the work I love. It’s an ethical double bind, one I can’t seem to find a way out of yet.

The high school me thought that college might help find other routes to self-fulfillment, so off to Colorado College I went. Back then, I imagined college as a career guarantee; by my senior year, I thought I’d know exactly what I’d want to do with the rest of my life. I’d walk into the Career Center one day, show them my resume full of various mostly-unpaid internships––hypocrite me, yet again, since I can afford to not get paid because of my family’s support—and walk out with multiple job offers.

Fast forward to now: I’m nervously biting my nails on the couch, scouring Handshake (CC’s job-search platform) for post-graduate job opportunities, desperately hoping to find a company that might at least read my application. I know that this is most likely a complete waste of time: according to a recent survey, over 85 percent of jobs are filled through networking. Companies within the creative industry don’t exactly cruise around colleges looking for potential hires. Instead, they get thousands of applications online and in person, most of which they likely don’t read, unless they already know your name.

The rational part of my brain tells me I should be asking everyone I know and their mother about potential opportunities, politely and over coffee. That’s the path any career-finding resource emphasizes to the extreme, But since I’m 22 and haven’t exactly acquired a wealth of useful connections of my own (in this regard, my college experience has been less helpful than I’d hoped), I will most likely have to rely on my parents’ network.

The reality that I will probably have to leverage my unfair privilege feels uncomfortable, but the fact is, it’s not about me, or the 68 percent of CC’s population that pay full tuition. Rather, it’s about those to whom the shimmering American Dream still beckons. Those are the people who spend months traveling over 2,000 miles north, only to be tear-gassed steps away from their destination; the people who spend hours in detention centers and embassies, or who walk across miles of desert in the hopes of crossing the border. The Dream—the idea of becoming anyone you want to be with hard work—guides their path like a lighthouse, but the few who make it to the end find themselves in front of a simple house lamp, which turns off when the electricity bill gets too high. This Dream—also known as America’s favorite invention and its founding ethos—is also what encourages people to bleed themselves dry to pay for their children’s college degrees, since the presumption is that their sacrifices will pay off.

Unsurprisingly, this Dream is just what it calls itself: a dream, as far from reality as a bus ride to the moon, your online data being private, or the U.S. government caring about the planet. The U.S. is currently one of the most unequal Western countries in terms of wealth distribution, far behind most of Europe, New Zealand and Australia, and trailing behind even places as historically unequal as Turkey. Now, get ready for some upsetting statistics: in 2013, the top 0.1 percent of the U.S. population owned the same percentage of assets as the bottom 90 percent. We’re told that we’ll have the opportunity to become richer than we were to begin with, but social mobility has drastically decreased since the 1970s. In many cases, people even fall down the socioeconomic ladder—in 2016, almost half of American 30-year-olds earned less than their parents did when they were the same age. The average U.S. income grew by 77 percent between 1970 and 2014, which, at first, might give some weight to this capitalism-is-nailing-it idea, except for the fact that almost all of that growth went to the top one percent of earners. This, combined with the lack of social mobility, keeps the upper classes incredibly insular.

In our competitive world, putting family before anyone else makes perfect sense. They are our biologically-determined in-group. In America, the love for family extends significantly into the job sphere: according to data from the last U.S. census, by age 30, roughly 22 percent of men will be working at the same company at the same time as their fathers. A total of 28 percent work for an employer that their father had recently worked for, but left (unsurprisingly, historical data on nepotistic mothers is pretty much nonexistent). In total, that’s over a quarter of the U.S. male population. Still, as with almost everything else concerning American existence, the statistics vary drastically between income groups; if your father is in the top 10 percent of earners, you are 150 percent more likely to work for the same employer as he does, than if your father is in the bottom 10 percent.

In general, the idea of working with (or for) your family doesn’t seem inherently unfair. In my own choices as a consumer, I often gravitate towards products made by family businesses, because this label leads me to believe my dollars are going to actual people, people who hopefully need them, rather than into the 0.1 percent abyss.

I would undoubtedly have less of an emotional problem with nepotism if I had a closer relationship with my parents. I’d also have less of a problem with it if the “family first” rhetoric didn’t hinder people whom we as a society have repeatedly left out—people whose families don’t have food security, or access to good education and health care. It’s impossible to blame people for looking out for their families. Capitalism requires competition, and we are biologically and socially inclined to define ourselves as “inside” a group. Since we mostly still exist within binaries, if there’s an “in,” there must be an “out."

The American Dream promises the people on the “out” a way in. If you work hard enough, it whispers, you can achieve anything. It’s this enough, though, that looks entirely different for someone like myself—someone who has access to an incredible education and a wealth of cultural and social capital purely through being born into it—versus someone whose upbringing didn’t allow the space to even think about that kind of capital because their basic survival was not guaranteed. Unsurprisingly, the countries with the smallest wealth distribution gap are Scandinavian; the same countries that are famous for having extremely high taxes and for using those to create successful systems of social welfare. Those nations essentially guarantee each of their citizens the same baseline access to food, shelter, and education, which allows everybody at least a similar chance at success.

Supporters of capitalism say that social welfare de-motivates people from working; for a very small number of people, that may be true, but when your circumstances are stacked against your survival, I imagine that getting basic needs met is what’s really at stake. That kind of thinking, though, to me further underscores a huge problem within the capitalist framework: it assumes that we are, or should be, driven to work in order to consume, rather than for any sort of fulfillment.

This is the framework that my family wants me to internalize. Any time I’ve voiced my interest in a purely creative sphere (in my case, mostly writing), they dismiss it by telling me that I don’t have the talent. To mitigate the harshness of the comment, they follow it up with something about the extreme rarity of talent in general, something along the lines of, “There’s only a single Dostoevsky in each generation.” I cannot blame them; after experiencing the Soviet Union’s version of communism, it makes sense for them to throw themselves as far as they can towards the other end of the spectrum. Still, their values are in a never-ending headlock with mine. I have been in the West long enough to see that money alone does little to make you happy. But as I’ve gotten closer to entering a career, I’ve noticed myself gravitate away from the spheres I find endlessly fulfilling but less lucrative, and towards the kinds of careers that provide a slightly larger (though by no means definite) guarantee of employment. I disagree with the values my family holds, but they still seem inescapable. If I ask my family for help in finding a job, which seems more and more inevitable the closer graduation looms, I will be validating the free-market impetus to “do anything to get ahead.”

In one way, my awareness of just how flawed the system is has been liberating. My parents tend to call my perception of institutional injustice “radically leftist.” But shockingly significant statistics back me up. Acknowledging these truths means I have to make real-life choices. To whom do I owe my loyalty: to my family, who have done everything in their power to ensure my survival and success, or to the people whose network the system subjugates? The question of my personal responsibility, though, I can’t answer in one sweeping sentence, because it asks me to make an impossible choice.

Blue Issue | February 2019

Needle Points

Tucked into the side of Colorado Avenue is a cozy, nondescript red adobe building. Inside is a softly-lit room with eight lounge chairs, white noise and relaxing music playing faintly in the background. It is here that Hannah Beachy first inserted needles into my body.

Beachy is the founder, owner, and one of three full-time acupuncturists at Springs Community Acupuncture. In this little red sanctuary, acupuncture treatment takes place in a group setting. Patients lie down and relax together in the same room—with, of course, tiny needles poked into them.

The first time I got acupuncture, I sat nervously as Beachy looked between her notes and my body, as if she was sizing up how to needle me. As it turned out, the needles were practically painless. A few on the left ankle. A couple on the right ear. One on each wrist. And one right in the middle of the forehead. Then, something washed over me—a wonderful, calm feeling that’s difficult to describe.

Colorado College junior Caroline Li says that the first time she got acupuncture, she drifted in and out of sleep. “Every once in a while, I would feel this hot wave through my body. It was both painful and really exhilarating.”

Annabelle O’Neill, a CC senior, sought acupuncture treatment at Springs Community Acupuncture two years ago for recurring yeast infections. “I tried every remedy known to womxn, and nothing was working,” O’Neill says. She says that during her first treatment, “Within two minutes, I was filled with this overwhelming sense of calm. It felt luscious like nothing else had. And then I took the most divine nap … it felt like there were curls of healing and loveliness going through me, and I still feel that every time.”

 ———

I first visited Springs Community Acupuncture last fall in search of a one-hit solution, or at least a bit of relief from stress, anxiety, and insomnia. I never imagined that walking into a room full of sleeping adults and having a near-stranger stick tiny needles in me would be the apparent solution. But I walked out of my first acupuncture session a convert.

 The theory behind acupuncture is based on ancient Chinese teachings about qi, the life force energy that flows through the body. It is believed that inserting needles into carefully chosen access points called meridians can correct the imbalances and blockages in qi, thus providing relief for a wide variety of health problems ranging from musculoskeletal pain, to stress, to neurological disorders, to headaches, to allergies, to irregular menstruation.

Acupuncturists thus speak about the body using a language of organs, pathways, channels, yin and yang, and elemental imbalances. According to Beachy, each acupuncturist draws on different practices and schools of thought to determine where to place needles, depending on the patient’s specific symptoms and context. Beachy, for example, often uses the five elements of Chinese medicine (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) to understand what is going on in her patients’ bodies. “All the elements have complex relationships with each other that help us explain our outer and inner worlds, and dynamics of health and illness in the body,” Beachy says.

Needless to say, these terms aren’t always compatible with the way modern Western science analyzes the body’s functions. This is why medical researchers often criticize acupuncture as a pseudoscience, attributing the perceived benefits of acupuncture to the placebo effect. Over the past few decades, hundreds of studies have been commissioned to try to figure out whether acupuncture actually works. Some medical researchers believe that acupuncture is effective, attributing its benefits not to qi flows but rather to a yet-unknown mechanism. But a large portion of the medical establishment seems determined to prove that acupuncture is entirely a scam. The message is that acupuncture (and other homeopathic remedies such as Chinese herbal medicine) can’t be explained by the Western medical logic we understand, so they must not work.  

Beachy is well aware of these debates. She just doesn’t really care. “I just tell [those who doubt acupuncture] to try it … If it didn’t work, why would so many other [medical practitioners] be trying to practice it?” (She’s referring to the numerous physical therapists, veterinarians, MDs, and chiropractors who often seek acupuncture certification—they hardly view acupuncture as a scam. Some local practitioners also work with Beachy and refer their patients to the clinic.) Beachy trusts her training, her personal experience, and the feedback she gets from her clients more than the inconclusive and skeptical medical studies. She knows she’s helping people feel better, and that’s enough.

Beachy’s approach to verifying the efficacy of her practice may sound subjective, but that might not be such a bad thing. The fact that acupuncturists usually put more weight on how patients say they’re responding to treatment is one of the many ways acupuncture can challenge how we think of medicine, our health care system, and the kind of healing we expect from it.

 ———

The history of acupuncture is hard to pin down—partly because many sources within the acupuncture world only vaguely describe its roots, while sources from outside often vehemently deride them. There are a few certainties: the medical practice of acupuncture appears formally in texts as ancient as the Huangdi Neijing, a dialogue between an emperor and his physician dated around 200 B.C. Acupuncture was widely practiced in China for millennia—but there were never any formal, wide-reaching standards of how to practice it. Rather, Beachy says, family lineages would pass on and develop their own traditions, resulting in a huge variety of acupuncture practices.

However, from the 17th century onward, interest in acupuncture steadily declined in China. In 1929, it was even outlawed as a subversive, irrational practice. Then came the 1949 Communist Revolution, which had the double effects of stoking nationalist pride and provoking trade restrictions that limited the inflow of Western pharmaceuticals. Under the direction of Chairman Mao Zedong, medical authorities commissioned standards and an educational method for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which compiled and streamlined practices from various family lineages. “They wanted it to create a cohesive, unified medicine,” Beachy explains, so that it could be easily taught in universities and administered in a uniform way. Somewhat ironically, Mao was trying to revitalize ancient practices by molding them to fit the expectations of both Westerners and urban Chinese elites for standardized, scientific medical care.

Mao’s nationalist medical project had the unintended effect of pre-packaging acupuncture just enough so that it could be accepted not only in China, but in the West. Chinese immigrant communities in the U.S. had long practiced forms of acupuncture based on their family traditions. But it wasn’t until the late 20th century, when China nudged its tourist doors open, that Westerners “discovered” the benefits of acupuncture. The formalized version of TCM that Mao had commissioned proved to be a hit in the Western market.

Beachy explains that acupuncture was largely appropriated and brought to the U.S. by, “young white males going over [to China], doing something ‘adventurous’ by studying Chinese medicine.” Beachy doesn’t mean to deride them as ignorant or dismissive of Chinese culture; “by and large, they were doing their best, learning Chinese, learning how to translate texts … They came back and founded schools, wrote the early textbooks and tried to get everything in English so that we could all learn it and have it be more reproducible.” But at the same time, in taking the already-streamlined version of TCM and submitting it to a national system of certification and regulation, Beachy explains, “people who had been practicing traditionally couldn’t practice it anymore.”

Another effect of trying to make TCM appeal to Western audiences was that, Beachy explains, “They sort of changed the model to be more of a private-room, elite practice.” The pioneers of acupuncture schools in the U.S. figured that Western consumers, accustomed to privacy in all health matters, would be averse to undergoing acupuncture in a group setting, as it was often practiced in China. That change made acupuncture increasingly expensive. Today, the average price of a single treatment at a private clinic is $75, ranging up to $250, and it often isn’t covered by health insurance.

Thus, not only is today’s form of acupuncture attacked as pseudoscientific, it’s also unclear how far it has strayed from its roots. Both of these facts contribute to the dichotomy of views about acupuncture: as Caroline Li, who grew up in China, puts it, “In the U.S., people either think it’s this spiritual thing or the biggest lie in the world.” People tend to either fawn over Chinese medicine because of its mysterious allure or scoff at it because of its lack of rigorous proof. Rarely do people view acupuncture as just a normal way to try to heal pain and injury. Li continues, “In China, it’s more like, when people are having trouble, when your kid is sick or something, let’s go to the acupuncturist.”

 ———

The inaccessibility of acupuncture was on Beachy’s mind when she graduated from Southwest Acupuncture College. She was in debt (a three-year master’s program in Chinese medicine is expensive) and facing a competitive job market with little turnover. She knew she would probably have to start her own clinic to begin practicing, but became dismayed when she realized that she herself wouldn’t even be able to afford treatment at regular private acupuncture prices.

The solution she found was community acupuncture, an established and growing way of practicing acupuncture led in the US by a nationwide co-op called People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture. A group setting allows the acupuncturist to treat and supervise multiple patients at a time in the same space, thus increasing client intake and decreasing amount the clinic needs to charge to keep running. Springs Community Acupuncture operates on a sliding scale model, in which you pay what you can between $17 and $35. The treatment room in Springs Community Acupuncture is often nearly full. The acupuncturist transitions constantly from patient to patient, balancing their individual needs.

But community acupuncture is much more than a cost-saving model. Annabelle O’Neill, for example, explains, “You’re in this room with about 8 other people, and there’s this feeling that ‘we’re all in this together.’” O’Neill says that when she mentions that aspect of Springs Community Acupuncture to others, “often times they reel back, and I think that’s our modern response; fear of dealing with healing around other people. I think that in breaking down those walls and sharing in that, so many beautiful things happen … People show up and they’re being vulnerable in ways that humans usually aren’t these days.”

Part of Springs Community Acupuncture’s mission is to offer treatment to marginalized and underserved populations. “We get people who can’t afford to go to the doctor,” Beachy says, “which is hard because we’re not trying to take the place of primary care, but we do what we can. A lot of seniors, a lot of veterans.” I recall one visit to the clinic in which I sat next to a very frail, elderly woman who spoke little English. When Beachy removed the needles at the end of her treatment, she exclaimed, “Hannah, that felt good!” It was as though she was astounded that she had actually found something that alleviated her pain.

The clinic offers periodic discounts for teachers, military service members, first responders, and seniors. The clinic is also in the final stages of becoming a non-profit, which means it will broaden its mission and commit to more community outreach.

The clinic’s emphasis on inclusiveness means that the acupuncturists have to be conscious about how they practice. “We kind of strip it of the mystical stuff,” Beachy explains. “I totally acknowledge that [a spiritual aspect] is also happening, but I don’t want to bog my patients down with thinking that they have to believe a certain thing for it to work.”

Beachy wants her practice to stray away from a common tendency in alternative medicine to criticize people’s lifestyle and health choices to the point of discouraging them from coming back. For example, instead of lecturing people about how they should really quit smoking, Beachy would rather work with them to ease their anxiety. “People are where they are, and we try to meet them there … We want to give them the tools to have more agency in their own health.”

 ———

Throughout my research on the issues of acupuncture’s legitimacy and cultural boundaries, I came across so many articles that were decidedly negative on what appear to me to be still-open questions of acupuncture’s effectiveness. One 2013 editorial in Slate accused acupuncture of being a Communist lie that Mao used to “swindle” the Western world. The author pointed to acupuncture’s “idiosyncratic” roots to dismiss it as unproven and unprovable, arguing that, “In truth, skepticism, empiricism, and logic are not uniquely Western, and we should feel free to apply them to Chinese medicine.”

I agree that non-Western ideas can also be subject to logical critique and standardization (so does Springs Community Acupuncture, for the record, which is implementing practices to better track people’s responses to acupuncture treatment). But look at the polarizing, exploitative, impossible-to-navigate state of the U.S. healthcare system. Look at people like myself and O’Neill, who went through so many empirically proven tests and tried Western medical solutions, to no avail. Are we really so sure that the West know the way to logically provide medical care? (Or anything else, for that matter?)

Instead of seeing what we can learn from acupuncture and other traditional medicines, we seem to be so desperate to hold onto the notion that Western medicine is an all-encompassing, totally rigorous science that we’re vehemently discrediting teachings that, when stated simply, seem obvious. The core idea of acupuncture is, after all, that your body is an integrated system and that different conditions and systems affect one another.

I’m not saying that acupuncture can replace primary care, or that you should boycott your doctor. It’s likely that not everyone will respond to acupuncture in the same way that I do. (Beachy explains that they want patients to know that acupuncture is a process and usually works best in a series of treatments: “There’s such a range of what can happen, but there’s enough of a pattern.”) And personally, I think it’s entirely possible that part of the positive effects I feel are because I associate Springs Community Acupuncture with the calm and meditative environment of the room.

But the fact is that I walk out of every acupuncture treatment feeling at peace and confident that I’ll sleep that night. Acupuncture is the only thing that’s been able to do that. It helps me feel better, and for me, as for most people, that’s what affects my life and well-being more than knowing exactly what to call my symptoms. Why would someone try to tell me that’s not legitimate?

Finding a way to seek acupuncture treatment responsibly while respecting its roots may be tricky. Beachy acknowledges that trying to create a new cross-cultural profession from something so ancient is “kind of like stumbling in the dark.” But I think she makes a good case that it’s worth the confusion. Her approach focuses on the good that her clinic can do: “We’re trying to make acupuncture available to as many people as possible, break down those barriers, and expand our reach and our access.”

I’ve found that acupuncture offers something that is all too often desperately lacking in Western medicine: the sense that health care providers actually take how you feel into consideration. So, at the very least, we can learn something from the way acupuncturists approach pain as something to be treated holistically, and their efforts to make healthcare accessible to everyone. And at most, we can learn a better way to heal.

Blue Issue | February 2019

The Dead Next Door

Nyack Hospital is snugly situated between two open spaces: the football field where my high school graduation ceremony was held and a giant, sprawling cemetery. This past summer, I spent five days holed up there with a mystery illness no doctor was able to pin down. Lying in wait with no cure in sight, my limbs grew gaunt, my belly grew swollen with IV fluids, and I listened to an elderly man down the hall hoarsely call out “Hello?” to no one in particular every night. As hour after hour dragged on, I came to the conclusion that the narrative of my life was foreshadowed in front of me: graduation served as a deceptively auspicious beginning, the hospital housed the drama of the middle, and the cemetery symbolized my forthcoming end.

I later found out that I have Lyme disease, one of the most common conditions afflicting upstate New Yorkers, and the only thing the team of upstate New York doctors didn’t properly test for. In short: I didn’t die. But when my dad’s car pulled out of the hospital parking lot after my release, I felt like I had barely made it out alive—not only because of the abhorrent level of medical care, but also because the tripartite omen was so disturbing. The cemetery, especially—in view of hospital windows, very visible on the way to and from the emergency room, and ever-visible in my thoughts—was deeply unsettling.

I am the kind of person that is always dealing with some sort of debilitating ailment: I’m like a hypochondriac, except things are actually wrong with me. I’ve been in and out of a million hospitals and doctor’s offices and prescribed medications for a million different reasons, so I don’t have any illusions about the fragility of my body. Lyme disease is just another thing to add to the list. I often think about how in things like cable news reports, the families and friends of murder victims, or people who die suddenly in general, always say that “you never think something like this is going to happen to you”—I always think something like that is going to happen to me, but usually I can distract myself with “Vanderpump Rules” or delicious pastas. With a cemetery in my face, this was a far more difficult task. I became curious about how people who see that image every day of their lives deal with it. If you live in view of a cemetery, are you constantly confronted with your own mortality in the same way that I was in that hospital room?

I conducted several interviews with cemetery-adjacent homeowners to try to gauge how dramatic I was being. Some kind strangers let me into their homes, others agreed to speak on the phone, and one couple preferred to talk to me through a chain link fence. Their outlooks varied.

Dawna, a Colorado Springs woman who had moved into her home just three weeks prior, said that the cemetery sealed the deal in the purchase of her house. Her grandmother had always lived near a cemetery. “Never on purpose,” she added. “It was just one of those things that follow you.” So when Dawna drove up and noticed the cemetery, “it was like a sign of comfort from my grandmother. It’s just a part of her being here with me.”

Miles, another Colorado Springs local, explained the thought process behind purchasing his house through a more business-like lens. He wanted to get in early on an up-and-coming neighborhood and, for him, the cemetery provides reassurance that no development projects will disrupt the area’s scenic surroundings. However, his future-centric, investment-driven outlook makes him feel as though the property allocated to cemeteries is not being used to its full potential: “I think that there’s a lot of land out there that’s reserved for cemeteries that could probably be put to better use,” he said, adding, “You know, you plant people and they don’t grow other people.”

But the most consistent aspect of all the responses was the fact that each person had reconceived the cemetery in a way that made death less central to it. For Dawna, it was the spiritual connection with her grandmother; for Miles, it was the promise of an unobstructed view of the mountains. Answers ranged from historical connections to simply enjoying a hilly place that provides good exercise.

Julia and David, the couple I spoke to through the chain link fence—safely cordoned off from me and the other “scumbums” that pass through their neighborhood—said that even though they had family members buried in the cemetery abutting their home, it didn’t affect their feelings about those losses. When I asked them if they felt closer to those relatives because of their proximity to their final resting places, Julia scoffed and replied with a definitive “No.” The closeness they have with those family members “comes from Jesus, and that we know we’ll spend eternity with them someday in heaven. It has nothing to do with them being buried in the graveyard.” David agreed: “They’re not there. Sorry! Once you die, your body goes in the ground, spirit goes somewhere else.” For them, the cemetery is just a pretty, peaceful place to walk, an asset to the neighborhood, graves be damned.         

After nearly 100 percent of the homeowners I spoke to reported that the cemeteries either had positive or no effects on their lives, I came to realize that it must take a certain kind of person to choose to live near a cemetery—a breed stronger and more well-adjusted than my sorry ilk. However, I am not alone: Nancy Blaker Weber, Broker Associate at Nyack Rand Realty, told me that in her experience, a view of a cemetery will often give clients pause, and even affect a house’s buyer pool (the percentage of customers active on the market with potential interest). “If the house is perfect, you’d get 100 percent of the buyer pool,” Nancy explained. “But as things are usually not perfect: if there’s no central air you’d lose people, if it was on a noisy street you might lose some people, and if it was right next to a cemetery you might lose some more people.” But every client is different: “Some people just feel things more deeply than others.”

Nancy recalled showing a cemetery-adjacent house to one particularly sensitive woman. It was beautiful, built in the 1800s—a really special find. “She was loving it and loving it, and we’re going through the house, and I hadn’t actually realized it, because last I had seen it there were leaves on the trees, but now it had been on the market a while and the trees were bare. She looked out one of the bedrooms and she could see the cemetery, and she immediately wanted to leave … She said it was just very unlucky.”

The position of a house in relation to a cemetery seems to factor into a buyer’s level of discomfort. Nancy remembered showing another house whose view of a cemetery was only through one side window—not one as personal or as prominent as that of a bedroom. Only about 20 percent of her clients took issue with the view, while the other 80 percent were unbothered by it. The amount of eye contact made all the difference.

The psychological undertaking of living next to a cemetery seems to be mediated by not only the directness of the view, but also how “dead” the cemeteries are themselves. Thomas, a longtime neighbor of St. Peter’s Cemetery in Lewes, Delaware, admires the cemetery for its historical significance and quaint, New England, “founding fathers” appeal. The cemetery, which houses graves from as early as the 1600s, no longer allows burials due to a lack of space and instead now functionally operates as more of a historic site. A little box on the property offers visitors a guide booklet that directs them to some of the cemetery’s more ornate headstones and tells the story of those buried beneath them. Families buried there go back five or six generations, which Thomas appreciates “from a legacy perspective.” To him, a cemetery “marks time, it marks people, it creates family trees. It has an enduring quality to it that I think has a lot of value.”

As a child, Thomas would go to Ireland to visit his extended family, and when he and his siblings arrived, they were required to go visit their family plot: “The first day, first morning, we had to go out to the cemeteries, because it is all about respecting your ancestors, your loved ones. And we were the Yanks, we had moved away, we didn’t really know them very well. We got a family history by going to those cemeteries. When I think of what my family tree is, and I remember who’s who, I largely think of gravestones, because that’s where they’re marked and how they’re marked.”

But for him, the connection to the past that cemeteries create is limited. His feeling is that “the further away you are from the actual people in it, the more connective it is; the closer you are, the more disconcerting it is.” When discussing visiting the graves of his parents, Thomas clarified, “I don’t find any comfort in it as a personal matter. Like, I don’t think they’re there. I don’t want to think about them there. I don’t want to think about my parents, you know, in a box in the ground. And because the relationship was so personal, the gravestone for them feels cold to me. They weren’t cold stone, they were warm people. So I find it very discordant in a very personal, intimate relationship.”

——— 

While I can’t claim that my hodgepodge of interviews equate to a formal sociological survey on this topic, it does seem like those who live cemetery-adjacent have all honed a specific skill: the intellectual separation of actual people, including themselves, from the place. There is no one way to achieve this—everyone seems to subscribe to a slightly different brand of peace with death. As Thomas put it: “If you’re not comfortable with the idea of death, you’re not going to be comfortable living near a cemetery.”

 ———

Going into this somewhat strange and dismal winter break mission, I knew that cemetery views were not for me. My stint in Nyack Hospital cleared up any confusion there might’ve been about this. But apparently I was so preoccupied with my discomfort that I had forgotten some very pertinent autobiographical details. Perhaps she figured I already knew, perhaps it had just occurred to her, but after weeks of discussion about this article, my mom casually texted me,

It’s characteristic of her to deliver information bluntly and without punctuation via text, but the nonchalance was unbelievable! Come on, Mom! Dumbfounded, I replied with frantic virtual laughter:

And then it all came back to me.

Immediately to the right of the giant, sprawling cemetery that haunted me this past summer is Village Gate Way, the condominium complex my mom and I lived in for most of my elementary school years. Though our house didn’t have a direct view of it, apparently we were frequent visitors. “We used to walk around and look at the deer,” my mom wrote. “There were always a lot of deer so you liked that.” This checks out.

I have one memory of the two of us at that cemetery. We had gone one evening to do grave rubbings, armed with printer paper and green and purple Crayola crayons. The cemetery was filled with fog, so much so that you could barely see in front of you. But, after a while, the fog parted, and over the rolling green hills, perfectly framed in the distance, was the most majestic buck I have ever laid eyes on. Mid-stride, directly facing me, muscle definition like a Greek god, antlers that just wouldn’t quit. I’m sure time has dramatized this image, but when I described it to my mom, she replied with a classically terse “Yes.”

Before the text bombshell, as far as I knew, that was the only time we had visited the cemetery. I hadn’t put two and two together in terms of how close it was, and I had no idea how frequently we had gone. My mom remarked that it had been a safe place to walk:

The safety or fun factors weren’t something I had seriously considered. Both Thomas and Julia shared memories of playing with their nieces and nephews in their respective cemeteries, riding bikes or running around with their dogs, but I had chalked this up as a symptom of their comfort level with the whole enterprise. Apparently, it’s not so uncommon.

After this conversation, I conjured up an image of young me frolicking around, surrounded by graves, having a grand old time—it still seems pretty weird, but in a way, it kind of makes me feel better. If I can hold onto the reminiscence of little me as opposed to focusing on the dust and bones of future me, is it possible that I’ll set up post-grad shop in front of a cemetery somewhere?

Unlikely, but no longer unthinkable.

Bad Issue | February 2019

Big Bad Wolf

There was a time when “Little Red Riding Hood” made me shiver, made me pull the covers up over my face so I wouldn’t catch a glimpse of a wolf glaring back at me through the dark window. I’ve outgrown that now, but I still hesitate before venturing into the woods. I remind myself that I’m safe, there aren’t any wolves out there. Humans haven’t left much space untouched for other far-roaming and territorial top predators. But in a few states, wolves are back, and so are those childhood storybook fears.

I saw a wolf for the first time six weeks ago. There are few places in Colorado where this is possible, and they’re most certainly not in the wild. Just like the grizzlies and the buffalos, Americans decimated wolves in their Manifest Destiny-fueled westward expansion. By the mid-20th century, overhunting had driven wolves out of the Rocky Mountains almost entirely. Not until 1974 did the new Endangered Species Act recognize their plight and give a federal mandate to restore them to their native rangelands.

In 1995 and 1996, this act came to fruition when a fleet of trucks dropped off a load of sedated Canadian gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Burly wildlife biologists in steel-toe Timberlands and Carhartts (or so I imagine) fitted each one with a little plastic ear tag, let them loose, and prayed they would like each other enough to copulate.

Wolves are pack animals that require plenty of territory to defend. They hunt together, share the responsibility of raising the alpha female’s pups, and generally depend on their group for survival. Needless to say, you can’t just let loose one or two and expect them to make it. So, they started with 50 and the wolf population took off. Fifty became 200 over the next decade, and that number continues to grow. Due to the return of their natural predators, the grossly inflated Yellowstone elk population decreased, overgrazed vegetation grew back, erosion improved, and waterways became healthier. The BBC produced an inspiring video about it called “How Wolves Change Rivers” that I remember watching in 10th grade biology. Many reintroductions of displaced species end in failure, but this one was a miraculous success.  

Wolves are apex predators (top of the food chain), and historically a staple of the ecology of the American West. Their position at the top of the food chain truly affects the rest of the ecosystem, so taking them out of the picture threw a wrench into the carefully balanced cogs of nature. Colorado State University-based conservation biologist Dr. Barry Noon informed me that it’s easy to tell that vegetation in Colorado is being overgrazed by unchecked elk and deer populations. “Hike anywhere in the Rocky Mountains,” he says, and you’ll see the damaged branches and stunted growth: “all the buck brush, antelope bush, mountain mahogany.”

People like Dr. Noon want to see wolves reintroduced to Colorado. He travels all around the state giving presentations at schools, workplaces, and public venues trying to educate people about the issue. In these efforts, he emphasizes the ample wilderness habitat available, the ecological benefits of wolf reintroduction, and the moral obligation of conservation.

Pro-wolf people like Dr. Noon argue that Colorado has the space. There exist tens of millions of acres of wilderness managed mostly by the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service, not yet reached by sprawling Denver suburbs or luxury ski resorts.

A large contingent of Colorado’s wildlife biologists, conservationists, and activists are on board, but that’s not all it takes. Wolf reintroduction has been met with considerable opposition. At the edges of the deep wildernesses, wolves and humanity mix—cattle graze and people wait at rural bus stops. Unsurprisingly, wolves are making a seriously bad first impression.

David Spady is a media consultant for Americans for Prosperity. This organization claims to “protect the American Dream by fighting each day for lower taxes, less government regulation, and economic prosperity for all.” He’s a self-declared environmentalist, but to be sure, “not the kind that lives in big cities, drives electric cars, and views mankind as a threat to the planet.”

Spady took it upon himself to put together a documentary likening the dangerous and predatory nature of wolves to that of the federal government. His documentary is called “Wolves in Government Clothing” and is aimed at highlighting voices of rural New Mexicans and Arizonans who feel threatened by their newly reintroduced wolf neighbors. One woman swears a wolf held her hostage in her own house.  Another resident puts her kids inside a cage at their school bus stop to keep the wolves out. That’s right—in rural New Mexico, people have constructed cages at bus stops to prevent their kids from being eaten.

“Kid cages” have unsurprisingly become subject to plenty of ridicule in the media. Experts will not hesitate to tell you that they’re completely unnecessary—human children at bus stops are simply not at risk. The very few wolf attacks that have been recorded (mostly in Canada and Alaska) involved sick animals or those that had become accustomed to getting food from humans.

Kid cages aside, the argument over whether or not to restore wolves to their native land is fraught with plenty of other loud and opposing voices. Back in Yellowstone, the plan was that once the wolves reached a population of 150, they would be delisted as an endangered species. Wolves in Wyoming would lose federal protection and would be handed over to state management. The state would continue carefully monitoring the population, but on their own terms. The Man would relinquish his control over Wyoming’s no-longer endangered species, and locals could establish a wolf hunting season.

Tom Toman, from Wyoming, works for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. He tells me that sure, he wants wolves back, they’re part of the North American heritage. However, he doesn’t think Colorado should bring them in artificially—it’s just too politically messy. In Yellowstone, the 150 threshold came and went, and wolves remained federally protected. This really pissed some people off. There was uncertainty as to whether wolves would make deer hunting for humans more difficult. Mostly, though, people didn’t like all the government meddling, seemingly without end. As Toman puts it, these were the moderates, the Wyoming hunting folk that didn’t mind too much in the beginning if the government brought in a few wolves. Yet, when the populations kept rising, “they were saying ‘I don’t mind, but boy, how many do we need?’”

Tensions continued to rise as the government seemingly failed to follow through on its promise to limit wolf populations. Wolves began to spread to the ranchlands on the outskirts of Yellowstone, killing cattle and sheep and generally making themselves more politically unpopular, or at least polarizing.

Environmentalists were thrilled at the success of the new wolf population. The conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife was and is still holding out for 5,000 wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Area, and won’t settle for less. But this number is based on historical populations before all the human settlement we have today, so it’s rather optimistic.

Toman says the wolf management choices “put some people into the anti-wolf category that didn’t need to be there.” The moderate Wyomingites who didn’t used to mind their wolf neighbors started to get fed up with the ever-growing wolf presence in their lives.

Sensing this conflict of interest, Toman says Defenders of Wildlife boldly proclaimed that they would compensate ranchers for each and every animal they lost to a wolf, forever. For a while, they actually did. But sometimes you just can’t tell whether your sheep was eaten by a wolf or by a coyote, or whether it just wandered off into oblivion never to be seen again—and why not get the wolf-lovers to pay you for those, too? Dr. Noon informed me that in wolf-occupied states, less than one percent of livestock mortalities are caused by wolves, less than was reported by ranchers to Defenders seeking compensation. After a few years, Defenders of Wildlife stopped paying ranchers, to the outrage of bereaved livestock owners.

Wolf populations have spread from their reintroduction site in Yellowstone and down from vast wildernesses in Canada. They can now be found across several states in the Pacific Northwest, northern Midwest, and a small pocket of New Mexico and Arizona. This is only a fraction of their historic range (which is most of North America) and yet, they’ve already managed to make an outspoken enemy of most of the agricultural sector. Accounts of sheep and cows killed by wolves in states farther north have many Colorado ranchers staunchly opposed to wolf reintroduction, and understandably so. It’s a financial risk threatening their livelihoods and an industry that feeds the nation. But is it, really? Coyotes and dogs kill livestock too, and in many cases, it’s hard to tell who the perpetrator was, according to Dr. Noon. He even makes the argument that wolves might drive down the booming coyote population that’s more likely to hunt low-hanging fruit like sheep.

Shortly after they stopped dishing out sheep compensation to ranchers, Defenders of Wildlife shifted its focus to a program called the Wolf Coexistence Partnership, in which they educate ranchers on learning non-lethal methods of discouraging wolves from picking off their livestock. They started with ranchlands in Idaho’s Wood River Valley, utilizing a cocktail of creative strategies. Cowboy-style range riders, sheep dogs, blaring alarm systems, non-lethal rubber bullets, and good old-fashioned fences. This all reduced the number of wolf kills by 90 percent, and in turn, reduced animosity.

This seems to me like an elegant solution to the conflict between man and wolf, a complex and politicized problem. But so often, what seems like the obvious solution gets lost in our society’s bureaucratic system and reluctance to learn and change. That’s where the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission (CPWC) comes in.  

The CPWC is a citizen board appointed by the Governor. They are in charge of policy and ecological management of Colorado state parks. Only two out of 11 members hold even a bachelor’s degree in science. Three of the 11 members actively run ranches and farms in Colorado. This surprised me—they’re in charge of policy that controls all the state parks, shouldn’t they have more experience in ecological management?

“They don’t have to have a degree—a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate in wildlife management. In fact, most [council members] don’t,” says Toman. Incredulous, Dr. Noon poses a question to me over the phone: “Could you imagine having a medical commission in Colorado that didn’t have any nurses or doctors on it?”

I replied that I couldn’t. In researching the commission more closely, I found that they’re accused of being influenced by the oil and gas industry—the chief administrative officer of Xcel Energy himself is on the commission. This sounds dangerously comparable to environmental regulation on a national scale (think about the major oil and gas tycoons Trump has appointed to head the EPA)  and blaringly contradictory. The actions of oil and gas industries generally do not facilitate ideal habitats for wildlife. The worst of it is that the CPWC holds tremendous political power—in 2016, they denied the reintroduction of wolves in Colorado. As of now, wolves are not to be reintroduced artificially, though the decision stipulates that if a wolf happens to wander over 300 miles south of Yellowstone, citizens are encouraged not to shoot it unless it proves troublesome.

Toman assures me that wolves are coming to Colorado on their own, and that we should just butt out of it. I asked Dr. Noon what he thought.

In true scientist form, he laid out his estimate of the exponentially decreasing statistical probability that wolves will recolonize on their own, based on several compounding variables. In a quick, back-of-the-napkin computation, he came up with about a one in 100 chance.

The area south of Yellowstone and the Tetons and north of Colorado wilderness areas could not be described as an ideal wildlife channel. Even in rural Wyoming, there are freeways and human settlements. Oil and gas extraction wells are also increasingly common, operated by so-called ‘man camps’—thousands of workers living together often in dormitory-like housing in the absolute middle of nowhere. “Young men with guns with lots of spare time,” summarizes Dr. Noon. “And what do they like to do with the guns? Shoot things.”

Dr. Noon’s estimate felt pretty convincing to me. The chance of one wolf crossing this expansive and formidable landscape is already slim, and, in order to make it, a wolf would need not only a breeding mate too, but at least repopulate a few other individuals to form a pack so that they could hunt successfully. However, anti-wolf reintroduction advocates continue to tout the argument that wolves are likely to repopulate Colorado on their own as a justification to oppose human-powered reintroduction. They cite the fact that there have been three or four confirmed wolves seen in Colorado (all of which people eventually killed). They also point to many more anecdotal wolf sightings—but these could have easily been misinterpretations of distant coyotes and dogs.

Another argument the commission used to justify their 2016 decision was that a Canis lupis (gray wolf) subspecies, the critically endangered Mexican Gray Wolf, was never historically present in Colorado, and therefore, shouldn’t be brought here now. This begs the question—why don’t we just bring in the northern gray wolf instead, the subspecies that did historically live here?

This claim seems like an obvious hole in their logic. I even asked a CPWC member to clarify their reasoning for me, with no reply. Regardless, Dr. Noon says their argument is based on an insignificant detail—I suspect it’s a diversion tactic by the commission. “Canis lupis, no matter which subspecies, will figure it out,” he says. He emphasizes that it’s also important to consider the fact that the distributions of wildlife species are dynamic, and always have been—basing our management decisions on historical distributions, especially now that we’ve altered the landscape beyond recognition, doesn’t make any sense. “It’s a silly argument,” says Dr. Noon, “It shows a lack of understanding of how ecological systems work.”

The CPWC is supposed to listen to a council of advisory scientists, but it seems like they opted to ignore them on this one. Why? We can only speculate, but I credit the questionable composition of the CPWC with making seemingly uninformed decisions, perhaps motivated by apathy and political pressure rather than conservation goals.

Snow was accumulating fast the day I visited the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center (CWWC) in rural Divide, Colorado. It’s one of the few facilities in the state that keeps captive wolves and offers educational tours to the public. I park my car and bundle up before venturing down the slick driveway to the welcome center. The fox enclosure to my left is complete with a multi-story “fox apartment” and the famed “only fox skyway in America” (and probably anywhere else). The resident fox is plopped like a king on the roof of his house, enormous bushy coat blowing slightly in the breeze, disinterested. There’s ambient music playing, which strikes me as strange. A little farther away, I catch a glimpse of a shaggy white wolf staring back at me. Behind a chain link fence she paces back and forth through the ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. If I tune out the classic rock and squint through the fence, I can almost imagine what she would look like in the wild. 

I take the feeding tour, so I get to watch the wolves eat dinner. The guide walks us past each forest enclosure designed to isolate a pair of wolves that get along amicably. All of them seem thrilled to see her, bounding back and forth behind the fence with mouths open and tongues lolling in wide, canine smiles. Our guide treats them like beloved dogs, cooing softly to each one as she throws them large chunks of raw meat.

Despite the endearing relationship between wolf and human that I witnessed on my tour, the CWWC emphatically discourages taking on wolves as pets. Illegal breeders sell captivatingly adorable wolf and wolf-dog hybrid puppies to people who think they can handle them. When the animal grows up, the owner realizes it is too intelligent and energetic to live a life of complicit domesticity. Approximately 200,000 abandoned young wolf-dogs are euthanized each year in shelters nationwide, according to the CWWC. They don’t belong in your home, they belong in the wild, they emphasized.

On my way out, they asked us to sign a petition in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project to be sent to the CPWC in favor of wolf reintroduction. The woman at the desk told me they were “cautiously optimistic,” though I suspect her display of hopefulness was just for my benefit.

Culturally, many of us are raised to fear wolves. Fairy tales from the European tradition consistently cast wolves as the trickster and the villain: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Three Little Pigs,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” It is no surprise, then, that even after we outgrow our childhood stories, this animal that we so rarely see in person remains ingrained as a symbol of danger for many. This narrative translates to politically outspoken anti-wolf advocacy that doesn’t reflect the science.

“Everyone has a right to their own beliefs and values, but they don’t have a right to their own facts and data,” says Dr. Noon. Real data seems to support that wolves cannot repopulate Colorado on their own. Kids are not in danger of being eaten at bus stops. Farmers can take measures to protect their livestock from the landscape’s natural predators. Wolves are extremely important to maintaining a balanced and healthy ecosystem. People opposed to coexisting with wolves seem to be using whatever anecdotal evidence suits their argument best. And without any experts on the CPWC (Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission), Colorado’s policy is based on this extreme viewpoint, which happens to have some of the loudest and most influential voices. How can we expect to make an informed decision without first reforming the system in charge?

Dr. Noon wanted to tell me one more thing that was on his mind. Not speaking as a scientist, just as a fellow human being. He pointed to the large Christian demographic in Colorado. “I don’t know how you can espouse a belief in creation and then pick and choose amongst the creatures, which ones you will tolerate and which ones you won’t,” he said. “How does it seem appropriate to be so hateful and so intolerant of one of this being’s most wonderful and complex and behaviorally sophisticated creations?”

 wolf | February 2019

The Blue Playlist

Coming down with the Block Plan blues?

Relieve (or fuel) your moodiness with the Cipher staff ’s 10 favorite blue-oriented songs.

Blue Issue | February 2019

The Blue Album

I’ve always been terribly skilled at being emotional; whether this is due to personal nature or stereotypical feminine melancholia, I’m never sure. Whatever the underlying reason for the rather harsh vicissitudes of my emotions, I’ve nursed my fragility with the help of a number of sensory aids. I tend to be a fan of the overly-something: coffee so hot my tongue never learns its lesson, sweaters so large they’re assumed to be my father’s, music so loud the elderly frown. I eschew middle grounds in general, opting instead for either too much or too little; Goldilocks always seemed like a finicky bitch to me.

So it makes sense, in the illogical maze of my mind, that I do things like sit in the storage closet of my apartment with the lights off listening to Joni Mitchell’s “River” as loudly as possible through my headphones or listen to “California” twenty times in a row when I finally leave the discomfiting dustpile that is Nevada into the Golden State on my drive home from school. I like to joke that you can tell from everything about me that I love Joni Mitchell, especially the “Blue” album. I sometimes feel that I’m a caricature of myself. The girl raised by lesbian parents in the Bay Area who studies creative writing at a liberal arts college loves Joni Mitchell? Yeah, makes sense.

——— 

I love love and I hate longevity. I find that anything that endures in my life only serves to make it feel shorter. If I spend my afternoons doing the exact same thing for a month, I won’t be able to distinguish them from one another and, in a flash, my month turns into a single afternoon. If happiness means being content, and being content means falling into a routine, then I worry that being happy means living a shorter-perceived life. But is that better than an excruciatingly long one marked by suffering and unhappiness?

Maybe it is; a literally long life has never particularly appealed to me, and that’s not just me languoring in melancholia but a genuine worry of leaving the party long after it was time to go. I suppose it’s another practice in extremes; I deal in bursts and flashes and flares. It might be better, easier to be slowly effusive, venting out energy in steady streams. But I’m not well-versed in matters of permanence, so for now (and maybe forever), I erupt.

I also love to cry. I try to do it as often as I can, about anything I can, and sometimes about nothing at all. During the aggregate 10 months or so that I was on Prozac, I didn’t cry at all. In my mind, I paired this with my relative inability to orgasm as well, and shelved it with the other reasons I hated Prozac (the primary reason being that it drove me into such insanity that I often worried on my walks home that the squirrels were filming me through cameras in their eyes).

During these months of drought-eyes and dread, I often turned to music to either take the place of or encourage tears. Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” has featured prominently in my life since I discovered it wedged between a Dixie Chicks and Indigo Girls CD on my mother’s shelf in early middle school. It became a fixture in high school, when I would lie on my bed listening to it, belly swollen with lovesickness. I remember listening to it on repeat freshman year of high school while reading “Love In The Time of Cholera” and feeling so filled with an inimitable something, relating so painfully to Florentino’s flowery sickness. Maybe it was the link between the flowers Florentino eats and the wine Joni could drink in “A Case of You,” the chronicling of that desire to entirely consume someone else, or at least the essence of them. It wasn’t then (and isn’t now) that I couldn’t get enough, but the risk that enough might cross into too much; that I might drink a case of someone and not stay on my feet.

At 14, I had yet to truly love and be loved by anyone, including myself, but I had already created a horrible habit I maintain to this day: I fall in love 20 times a day. Of course, my loving lacks the proper timing of courtship and understanding and intimacy, but it’s still love to me. It’s horribly treacly and starry-eyed of me, but I was raised and have remained a romantic despite myself. I’ve noticed that the people I know, especially women, tend to turn away from notions of romanticism as we often conflate it with vulnerability. Women are so often painted as crazy in love, chaining themselves to the first person they fall for, that it’s easier to offer a colder shoulder in order to not give the impression of hysteria or neediness.

I find this is a problem in hookup culture as well; people are loath to confess true feelings or say how they feel in fear of rejection, in fear of being vulnerable. I do this too, often burying my emotions so deep that even I’m unsure of what I really feel. To be vulnerable is to be hurt, to be rejected, to unearth the fear that you’re unworthy of whatever it is you’re searching for in the other person. Although I might not have in the past, I’m starting to think that the pain might be worth it. Bear all and bare all, even and especially when it’s easier to not. Like in “Little Green,” where Joni writes about the baby she gave up for adoption when she was 21. The bittersweet of the song sounds how other lives might have felt, sounds like placeless nostalgia … if Joni can write “Little Green,” I can weather any storm of emotion that might barrage me. I can be thankful, in the end, for the vulnerability. I have already learned that sometimes, there will be sorrow.

 ———

We shy away from vulnerability in order to keep from getting hurt by and hurting others, which I suppose is a well-intentioned action, but it means living at 50 percent saturation. There’s a Fernando Pessoa quote that I often think about, from “The Book of Disquiet.”

 ———

“To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind … in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window.”

——— 

This, to me, is the art of being delicate. To be delicate is to break every day, break yourself and let yourself be broken, to truly feel everything. In my mind, Joni Mitchell is a Pessoan woman like myself. Maybe I’m projecting, but the words “I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad” in “River” make it hard to feel like Joni and I aren’t the same in some deep, permeating, internal way.

Sometimes I worry this will destroy us. Joni has Morgellons, a disease in which the individual believes there are fibers under, in, or emerging from the skin paired with a crawling sensation, and often sores from scratching. Medically, it's considered a psychological offshoot of delusional parasitosis. This makes me scared of my strong connection to Joni; I see much of myself in her delusions. Aside from recurring nightmares where Play-Doh pushes out of my pores in strings like in one of those Crazy Cuts kits, I already feel myself falling fully into other delusions. Delusional parasitosis often fully develops or emerges after age 40, and more often in women, but anyone who knows me well knows I often joke about how I am perpetually convinced I am infected with parasites; I get tests to check for parasites at least once a year and sometimes worry I have parasites that have evolved to be undetectable. On one level, I see that I’m being ridiculous and overly-anxious, but on a deeper, more internal level, I go to bed noting every place my skin twitches and scratch away any sort of bug bite I get, mentally terrorized by the parasites I know can’t exist, but do nonetheless.

Logically, Joni Mitchell’s Morgellons and my parasite fixation can’t have anything to do with our vulnerability. But it feels that way to me, sometimes—like our emotional rawness has allowed spidery darkness to creep in and hijack our brains into believing things that can’t be true, into hurting us. I know I denounced emotional middle grounds, but I find myself desperately searching for one to settle into safely, a gray area to wrap myself in so I can coast by comfortably in life. Unfortunately for me, and maybe for Joni, those gray areas don’t come easily.

——— 

Is this what our vulnerability has done to us? Have we peeled down our sensations so many times that we can’t put them back in the shop window? Maybe the feel-everything in me has ruined me, in a sense. Maybe it’s unsustainable. But in “All I Want,” Joni says she wants to belong to the living, and at the end of the day, I think I do too. My life often feels like an exercise in staring directly at the sun as it rises. The sunlight hurts my eyes, but I continue to look because I know it’s also beautiful. The things that we love will very likely destroy us one day, but that doesn’t mean we should close our eyes. Even if life is one extended risk assessment, I can’t think of a risk not worth taking or a death I wouldn’t die to live my life in full color.  

No Snow and Bad Wine

When I found out I was attending the 2018 annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Katowice, Poland, my key goal was to learn as much as possible about Small Island Developing States (SIDS). A 2002 study estimated that over 200 million people will be displaced due to climate change. I found this statistic shocking and felt the need to educate myself further, and learn what role I could play in combating the issue.

The conference itself took place in a space that felt like an airport, white walls and no windows, constructed purely for the purpose of hosting the conference. As I picked up my ID badge and walked through security, I noticed the large letters spelling out “Welcome to Poland,” displayed front and center. The second thing I noticed were the endless piles of paper behind a desk named “Documents Distribution.”

Throughout the two-week-long conference, I began to observe more and more how unsustainable the most important gathering on climate change in the world actually was. Disposable cups. Single use silverware. Plastic water bottles. No composting. Very few vegetarian or vegan options. The list went on and on.

Every evening as I left the conference center to take a tram back to the hostel, the sight of smog and the smell of burning coal would remind me that not only was the event creating a ton of material waste, it was also being powered by coal. The conference would eventually teach me to notice the nuances that exist within the effort to combat climate change—that sometimes we cannot see the problem, even when it’s right in front of us.

At the conference, there were almost 30,000 registered participants from all over the world representing hundreds of different delegations, from countries, to NGOs, to institutions like CC. While the participants are ideally supposed to represent the world population, I felt like I was at a European Union conference rather than a United Nations conference.

Many of the other participants shared these frustrations, as well as those expressed earlier, including CC Junior Paige Shetty (Colorado College junior), who told me, “Leaders at the conference continued to emphasize the urgency of the crisis, yet almost everyone who attended the conference had flown on a plane. These same people likely knew that one air-mile produces, on average, 53.3 lbs of carbon dioxide. Additionally, the venue itself was built specifically for this conference and would be taken down at its conclusion, only for another large venue to be built somewhere else for next year’s conference. How can we expect countries to reduce their emissions when the leading conference for climate change is not a model for sustainability?”

From 10 a.m to 8 p.m every day except Sunday, there would be dozens of events running at once that anyone with a conference badge could attend. Al Gore led an event called, “The Climate Crisis and its Solutions,” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hosted an event titled “Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS)— Regional Perspectives on the 1.5º Special Report,” and the government of Fiji and NAP Global Network ran an event called “Launch of Fiji’s First National Adaptation Plan.” There was a lot to learn and definitely not enough time.

One evening I attended an event called “Bordeaux 2050.” Bordeaux 2050 is a wine from the future that gives us the bitter taste of global warming. The premise of the wine event was a warning: the Bordeaux wine region in France is at risk to severe conditions of climate change, and by 2050, Bordeaux grapes may lose their rich and wonderful taste. “Despite the fact that global warming is a reality, many feel that it is a distant, abstract problem. So the French Association of Journalists for the Environment decided to give the French people tangible proof of climate change by hitting them where it hurts the most: wine, of course,” The French Association of Journalists for the Environment wrote. They partnered with researchers, scientists, and wine experts (like Excell Laboratory, France), to study the 30 year projections of current climate data and to create a wine that simulates the taste of a Bordeaux wine grown in 2050.

Each of the wine tasters swirled their glasses, smelled the wine, and took a sip. Reactions ranged from excitement about the idea itself, to shock and disgust. Some called it flat and non-complex, others called it sour, the general consensus amongst everyone, however, was that the wine did not taste nearly as good as the Bordeaux wine people from all over the world know and love today.

On the Bordeaux 2050 website, the homepage reads:

Bordeaux 2050

The Real Taste of Global Warming 

Do you know someone who still believes global warming isn’t real? Your pro-Trump uncle or that weird colleague you avoid at lunch? Fill in their details and we’ll send them a bottle of Bordeaux 2050.

If you choose to send a bottle of Bordeaux 2050 to someone, their suggested message is “Dear Climate Sceptic, here is a bottle of Bordeaux 2050, a wine straight from the future. It will give you a bitter taste of global warming … but please, keep your glass half full. Very warm wishes.” I sent one to Donald Trump … wishful thinking, I know.

After attending this event and doing more research on Bordeaux 2050, I was inspired by the work that the French Association of Journalists for the Environment had done. They took something that many people (especially the French) love and tangibly showed how climate change will affect it. They are making people think, “What would France be without really good wine?” Brilliant.

Given the excitement and chatter in the room after the event, I imagined these people going home to share the story of the wine tasting with their families and friends. I then started thinking about how I could use this method to encourage people to really pay attention to the impacts of climate change in Colorado. Is there something that Coloradans care about as much as the French care about wine? The outdoors, of course! What would Colorado look like without skiing and snowboarding? Recent statistics show that 71% of Colorado residents participate in outdoor recreation each year, and this doesn’t even include visitors that travel to Colorado.

A huge sector of the outdoor recreation industry in Colorado is skiing. In 2015, Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA) and Vail Resorts, announced the findings of a new economic impact study on Colorado’s ski and snowboarding industry. As the leading ski state in North America, Colorado’s ski industry generates $4.8 billion annually. However, if ambitious climate action is not taken soon enough, skiing in Colorado, as we know it, will be gone.

Several reports and studies have come out over the years projecting the impact of climate change on skiing in Colorado if emissions do not decrease. Here are a few of the many shocking possible outcomes evaluated through different studies:

1.     Summit County can expect late 21st century winters to feel about 10ºF warmer with 25% fewer average annual days at or below 32ºF. This means that the ski season will be shortened by about 1 month by the end of the century.

2.     High greenhouse gas emissions scenarios (continuing to emit at the exponential rate we are currently emitting at) are likely to end skiing in Aspen by 2100, and possibly well before then, while low emission path scenarios (reducing current emissions) preserve skiing at mid-to-upper mountain elevations. In either case, snow conditions will deteriorate in the future.

3.     EPA projections estimate that many Colorado Ski resorts could see winter seasons shortened by up to 80% by 2090. This not only impacts skiing but also impacts the state’s water resources.

 Regardless of which prediction comes true, each outcome proves dim. I hope that these statistics leave a bad taste in your mouth the way that Bourdeaux 2050 did for those who attended the conference.

To get a different perspective on the issue than my own and that of academic literature, I interviewed CC sophomore and avid skier Amy Raymond. Amy grew up in Centennial, CO and has been skiing for around 15 years. Last year (2017-2018), she skied 52 days. For Amy, skiing is a priority.

When I showed Amy the statistics predicticting less snowfall and a shorter ski season, Amy said, “This makes me feel really sad for a few reasons: one is that climate change is negatively impacting and kind of destroying this sport that I love. I dream of being an old retired woman on a chairlift who skis an unreasonable amount and makes friends with young people on the chairlift and this dream is honestly looking kind of impossible … Also, skiing is already so monetarily inaccessible for a lot of people, and a shortened ski season will only make skiing more inaccessible.”

Although Amy is saddened by these statistics, she is not surprised: “Comparing my winters as a kid in Colorado versus now, it’s pretty obvious we’re getting less precipitation and higher temperatures. It makes me feel sort of hopeless and definitely complicit. Skiing is honestly a pretty unsustainable sport that’s bad for surrounding environments and the environment at large, but odds are I’m not going to stop skiing anytime soon, so I’m part of the problem, which is very true but still sucks to acknowledge.” After speaking with Amy I realized how my intuition proved true; these statistics were especially upsetting to Colorado skiers.

What can skiers do in this dismal and contradictory situation? I decided to reach out to the Director of Planning and Sustainability for Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Matt Feier, to get his expert opinion on the matter.

Matt explained how Crested Butte was preparing for this predicted decrease in snowfall and expected shortening of the ski season. He said, “There is widespread acknowledgement in the industry that we need to remain nimble and adaptable to change, and that we all may need to consider other business models and revenue streams in order to remain successful.”

Thanks to input from Matt and Amy, I have come up with a list of things that people who ski and ride can do to help combat climate change in Colorado. 

1.     Pressure ski resorts to pursue sustainable practices and only ski and ride at resorts that acknowledge climate change and are actively doing something to combat it.

2.     Vote for those who are passionate about climate action.

3.     Offset your own carbon footprint from traveling to and from the mountains. Check out the Colorado Carbon Fund, a local non profit dedicated to decreasing carbon emissions, to learn more.

4.     Pressure gear companies to pursue sustainable practices and consider only purchasing new gear from companies that have sustainable practices (i.e. Phunkshunwear, Zeal Optics, Picture Organic Clothing, GrassSticks, Meier Skis, and Capita Snowboards).

5.     Donate to organizations that are doing conservation and sustainable activism work. Protect Our Winters (POW) is a great organization specifically focused on climate activism for winter lovers.

While these statistics are jarring, they are only a starting point: we have to start with what we love and grow to make bigger change from there. I wanted something more personal to catch people’s attention and get them to care, like Bordeaux 2050 does. Watching massive flooding and forest fires destroy our nation and the rest of the world on television and on our phones, it’s easy to become distanced. We do not feel the immediate impacts, so how do we know where to take action? The first thing that came to mind was art: visuals are a great way to get people to think and care about something that they otherwise wouldn’t have, like bringing awareness to the bottle of wine that sits on the dinner table every night. We can use our experience with wine and skiing as a means of connecting with the greater issue of climate change, something that can feel distant and thus paralyzing.

The art you saw at the beginning of this article, and might have seen around campus, is meant to get ordinary people like you and me to care about climate change, and most importantly, to start acting. It is easy to become complacent when we hear about climate change all the time, but if I took anything away from the conference in Poland, it is that climate change is the biggest and most urgent problem that humanity is facing. We all need to be doing our part if we want widespread change to happen.

For years, scientists and reporters have been sharing the facts behind climate change, but clearly, statistics are not always enough. Apparently, it is not enough for us to be told that islands are going underwater and millions of people are being displaced, or to hear about people dying due to an extreme weather event. So what is enough? What motivates us to recognize the change that needs to be made? For those at the Bordeaux 2050 event, it was wine. For many Coloradans, it’s skiing. The United Nations Climate Change Conference left me with a strong desire to get people to care and act, by contextualizing climate change into something tangible.

Blue Issue | February 2019

Boys Talk More Than Girls

It’s Friday, and we have one more weekend—three days—until we will officially be middle schoolers. Sam and I are sitting at the counter in her kitchen eating chocolate-covered almonds, trying to tide ourselves over until lunch.

Sam’s kitchen is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s at the back of her house, where there’s one giant window, so light pours in even during winter. Every Christmas we sit at the benches around her kitchen table and make tamales, snow piling up against the glass, steam heating the room, family and friends squished together on the benches. We criss-cross our hands to press masa, scoop filling, tear corn husks, and tie them tight. There’s a counter that wraps around the kitchen, where we sit the rest of the time, stuffing our faces, listening to music, and laughing.

“At least you guys are in homeroom together,” Sam’s sister, Francis, says. She’s making us curry, and the whole kitchen smells like sticky rice and turmeric. “When I was in sixth grade, I didn’t have any friends in my class.”

My eyes get big. “Oh my gosh, I would die,” I say.

“Yeah, what if?” Sam says. She almost looks scared.

“Well, you’d probably have to make new friends,” Francis says. Sam and I laugh, even though it’s not funny.

Sam is my best, and maybe only, friend. We met when we were five years old, on the first day of kindergarten. I don’t really remember that day, but I do remember when I broke my arm in first grade, and she told everyone to stop playing on the monkey bars so that I wouldn’t feel left out. And I remember in fifth grade when she cut her hair, and people made fun of her, saying she looked like a boy, so I threatened to punch them. Even though she knew I wouldn’t, I think it cheered her up. And I remember last year she liked Max, but he liked Lucy, so we went to Sam’s house after school and watched “The Notebook” and ate ice cream like you’re supposed to. I tell her everything, like how my sister talks the whole time at dinner and if I try to say something she glares at me and says, “Lily, you’re interrupting.” Or how my dance teacher yelled at me until I cried and then yelled at me for crying, which only made me cry harder. Sam tells me more than she tells anyone else, like how her sister screams to get her way, and how she wishes she had something she was passionate about like dance. I am nervous about middle school, but at least Sam will be there. Sam, who is never nervous about anything.

seventh grade

I’m in the breezeway, walking to Language Arts class. Through the glass, I see the wind blow and shake burnt orange leaves off of the maple trees, and I hope there are enough leaves in Sam’s yard to make a pile after school. Or are we too old for that? I’ve just decided that I’ll ask her about it during lunch when someone says:

“You should date Jack.”

I turn around to see Maddie Adler’s round face and blue eyes staring expectantly at me. Maddie Adler: friends with Maureen and Rose and Elizabeth (who goes by Biz). Friends with Hugh and Freddy and Owen and Gus who come in late and skate down the stairs and TP people’s houses, but not in a mean way. I know who she is, but I have absolutely no idea why she is talking to me.

“What?” I say.

“You should date Jack,” she says again.

“Jack, who?” I ask.

“McCoy,” she says, like it’s obvious.

I try to think. I know him. Jack McCoy. Tall, lanky, hockey player, football player, went to Woodland Heights Elementary, friends with all the Woodland Heights jocks. Jack McCoy.

“Why?” I ask. She and Jack are not friends. She shrugs.

“He’s nice,” she says, biting her cuticles, “and he likes you.”

“He does?” I clench my jaw shut. Stupid, stupid! Did I sound like I wanted him to? Now she’ll think I like him. That I’m desperate for some boy I’ve never even talked to.

“Yes,” she says, without looking up. I don’t know what to say, but she tells me, “Just think about it.” When I look around, the hall is empty and the doors are all closed. I run down the stairs and when I get to my class, I’m breathless.

——— 

I have only liked one boy so far. His name is Henry, and he was in my art class last year. He had this funny mushroom-shaped eraser, and we would spend all class stealing it away from each other just so our hands could touch. He’s a hockey player and sometimes says mean things to people, but he was never mean to me. He would tell me that my hair looked nice, and he would watch my soccer games and tell me I played well even when I didn’t. I don’t like Jack, but I think maybe I could. He looks at people anxiously, like he’s afraid they’ll find something out about him that he doesn’t want them to know. But then sometimes he forgets, like when he’s running down the halls with his friends, yelling and tackling each other.

A few days later, Jack walks up to me in the hall. He looks at me strangely, like he wants something from me and he expects me to know what it is. The words that come out of his mouth go in one ear and out the other—but I feel my cheeks burn red as I say, “Okay.”

 ———

That Friday night, I’m lying on Sam’s bed while she searches her dresser for the perfect “I-look-cute-but-totally-by-accident” top because a girl named Riley invited us to her party, and Sam says we have to go. We’re talking about how we should start a roller skating club at school.

“I really want to learn how to do tricks,” she says.

“Like jumping?” I ask.

“And going down the stairs,” she says. She finds the perfect shirt—a slim Hanes—and slips it on. It hangs off her frame, and I look down at my shirt: too tight, too short, exposing the pudge spilling over the top of my jeans. I fight the urge to pinch it. Instead I lean back on the bed, putting all my weight on my wrists so that when I look down, my stomach is flat as a board.

When we get to the party, strobe lights are flashing, and “Bedrock” is blasting. Riley and her BFFs—the ones with the jean shorts and tank tops that somehow make them look even skinnier than they already are—are grinding on each other. Butts out, legs wide, hips brushing on inner thighs and small backsides. The boys gather around, watching. I look to Sam. She looks back. Our eyebrows go up at the same time.

“Is it too late to go home?” I ask under my breath.

“Oh, come on,” Sam says, nudging me. She grabs my hand like she’s going to pull me into the crowd, but instead she inches forward so slowly we are basically standing still.

Riley spots us and disentangles herself from the flailing limbs and shaking bodies. She pushes through the outer ring, placing her delicate palm on a boy’s chest. He melts away, letting her through.

“Sam! Lily! I’m glad you guys came!” I want to roll my eyes, but I look at Sam, who is smiling as genuinely as she can, trying not to look at the dance floor. Jack is already here. He saw me when Riley did, but he waits until now to acknowledge me. He comes out of the crowd and approaches us tentatively.

“Lily. Sam,” he says. I smile politely at him, but he is looking at me strangely, like he wants something from me and expects me to know what it is. He takes a step closer and wraps one gangly arm around my shoulder, which is a full foot beneath him. I stand still, fighting the urge to shrug him off.

“Let’s dance!” Riley says. Sam and I follow her back towards the crowd of people, but Jack takes my hand and pulls me away from them.

“Come here,” he says. He takes me to a room in the back of the house. He says, “I’ve been wanting to kiss you,” and he kisses me. It’s not good, and it’s not bad. Mostly, I’m happy when it’s over. We date for two months. On our one-month anniversary, he gives me a card and a stuffed animal.

——— 

On our two-month anniversary, he gives me a box of chocolates and roses. I break up with him the next day at recess. I’m not sure why I do it. Maybe it’s because I don’t like him anymore, or because I never liked him to begin with, or because we’ve gone out for two months and flirted, texted, went on dates, held hands, bought each other gifts, and kissed, so what more is there to do? Maybe the reason doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s enough that whenever we were together I always wanted to be with Sam instead of him.

My favorite dates with Jack were when we would go skiing. Sam’s sister would drive us—me, Sam, Jack and one of Jack’s friends, usually Alex or Zach—and we’d stay all day, until the mountain closed and they kicked us out of the lodge. Sometimes Jack and I sat next to each other on the lift, and he’d put his arm around me, and we’d talk about how the run was, and which run we should do next, and when we should go in for fries and hot chocolate. Sometimes I would sit with Sam, and we’d talk about what we would buy if we were rich, and where we would go if we could go anywhere, and she would say something dumb that made us laugh until we cried.

When I break up with him, it’s freezing, and he’s on the basketball court standing on the sidelines talking to his friends.

“Can we talk?” I ask. I try to say it quietly, but his friends stare at me. Some of them go, “Ooh,” and some of them glare. I lead him over to the snow mound at the edge of the playground. I stand on top of it, rolling my feet back and forth as I talk. “I think we should break up,” I say, in a single breath.

“Okay,” he says. I don’t want to look at his face. But I see it anyways, crumpled in a deep frown, color rising, and eyes pinched. He doesn’t say anything. He turns around and walks back to his friends before I can say any more.

“Lily,” I hear someone say, soft and sweet. I turn around and see Sam. “Did you do it?” she asks. She sounds breathless and it makes me want to hug her. But instead I clench my fists and my jaw and try to swallow a tightness in my throat I can’t explain. A weight drops right into my stomach and stays there, all the way until the last bell rings. I feel the same way I did that time I cut the clothes off my sister’s stuffed animal and ruined it. When my parents asked me if I did it, I lied, so they scolded me, and I cried.

“That was terrible,” I say, when I finally find the words. We’re a block from school and a block from her house. The trees are hanging over us with that light green that only comes after the frost has melted into the dirt and bathed the roots in an icy, wake-up shower.

“It seems like he took it well, at least,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Are you sad?”

“Yeah.”

“But you wanted to do it.”

“I know,” I say, “but I’m still sad.”

“Break-ups are hard,” she says somberly. And we both sigh. We pass the house with the black wire fence and the yapping dogs, then the house with the bees and the hand-painted “Honey for Sale” sign, then the house with the yard covered in plastic flamingos and cracked garden gnomes. I check them off in my head as we pass them: dogs, bees, junk. And then we get there, walking through the gap in the bushes that leads us home.

We walk in through the back of her house and go straight to the kitchen, which is perfect because that’s exactly where I want to be. Sam takes out the chocolate-covered almonds and we dig in. I lay on her kitchen floor and she sits on a chair next to me, and we play Led Zeppelin as loud as we can and pile in the almonds until we can’t eat anymore.

——— 

The next day in class, Jack’s friend Alex leans over and says, “You’re a witch,” just quietly enough so that the teacher doesn’t hear him. He pauses before the “w” and emphasizes the “itch.” I get the point. I know I should ignore him, but I turn around and look at him, just to see his face. He’s smiling maliciously, anger in his eyes, a grin on his face.

I want to tell him to shut up. Instead, I clamp my lips together, turn back around and try to focus on the teacher.

Boys talk more than girls and soon the whole school knows I broke up with Jack. In my classes, people whisper behind me; in the hallways, people bump into me and say it to my face; in the cafeteria, people walk up to me just to tell me what I am. Witch. Emphasis on the “itch.” Some people slip up and say the real thing; some people say the real thing on purpose.

——— 

I’m lying on Sam’s floor again, eating chocolate covered almonds.

“It’ll get better,” Sam says, lying next to me. “It’s only been a few weeks. People will get over it and forget it and everything will go back to normal.”

“I hope so.”

She looks at me and scrunches her lips. “Jack’s dumb,” she says. “And all his friends are dumb too.” She is trying to make me smile, and I try to smile for her, because I want her to feel like she is helping me, but I can’t. My face feels like it is made of stone. My whole body feels like it is made of stone; I am sinking into the floor. We both reach into the almond jar, but our hands get stuck and she laughs, and after a second, I laugh too.

 ———

“Spencer likes you,” Biz says.

“What?” I say.

“Spencer likes you.” Spencer Nelson. I don’t have to think this time. I know him. Average height (average everything really), neighborhood boy, family friend, we used to watch “Dumb and Dumber” while our parents played euchre. Spencer Nelson.

“I don’t think so.”

But when we have to make Valentines in Spanish class, he gives me one that says “Te Amo,” and I have to admit that Biz might be right. He invites me over to his house, and I say sure. We watch “Sky High” in his living room. My friend Peter is also in our Spanish class. He doesn’t make me a Valentine, but we talk during class and hang out at recess sometimes. He asks if I want to watch “Star Wars,” and I say sure, because he’s my friend, and we watch it in my living room.

Boys talk more than girls, and soon the whole school thinks I’m dating Spencer and Peter. I’m no longer just a bitch, now I’m a bitch and a slut, but “slut” is worse so they call me that more. I’ve only ever kissed one boy, and his name was Jack, and he was my boyfriend, and now the whole school is calling me a slut. Okay, maybe not the whole school, but enough people that I can’t walk down the hall without hearing it at least once. I spend a lot of time on Sam’s kitchen floor that week, and that week turns into a month, and I start to think of that floor as my home.

 ———

The snow melts, and I’m glad because I don’t want to go skiing anymore. It’s Slap-Ass Friday, so I walk down the hall with my hands covering my butt. Sam is trying to tell me about a movie she watched last night but I can’t focus. I see Julie walking in front of me, wearing a skirt. A boy walks past, reaches under her skirt and touches her bare ass. She swats him away like a fly. Fridays are worse for me than most girls because of the whole slut thing, but at least I remember not to wear skirts. I am not sure if they actually think I like it, or if they are just trying to be mean. Either way, after I break up with Jack, I don’t go a single Friday without getting my ass slapped at least once. Sometimes they miss, but Jack never misses. One Friday, I wear sweatpants and Alex pantses me, and the rest of the day different boys come up to me and say they love my pink underwear. I learn to wear shorts under my sweat pants after that. One day, I wear a skirt and Zach comes up to me and tells me he likes the frills on my underwear. I look behind me and see Jack, front and center in a crowd of boys. It isn’t even Friday.

After that, I wear shorts under my skirts, too.

I end up dating Spencer after all. He asks me out for real and I say yes, because I have no reason to say no. He takes me to the movies, and we sit in the theater. He makes out with me until my lips are raw and there is slobber all over my face. I try to see past his head so that I can tell how close Iron Man is to defeating Stane so that I can tell how much time is left in the movie. When my dad comes to pick us up, I wonder if he can tell, if he knows what we were doing. I hope he doesn’t ask about the movie, but he does, so I say that it was good, watching his eyes in the rear view mirror. Spencer is silent beside me, staring out the window and smiling.

On Friday night, when I’ve just finished eating dinner with my family, Spencer texts me, “what’s up?” I type, “nm u?” which means “nothing much, you?” He asks if I want to go to the movies, and I want to say no, but we are dating, so I say yes. My dad drives us to the theater.

We do this every week. During the school day, he hangs out with his friends, and I hang out with my friends, and then the weekend comes, and we go to the movies together and make out until I want to cut my lips off my face and give them to him so we don’t have to go to the movies anymore.

“Break up with him!” Sam says. We are sitting in the TV room. “Skins” is on in the background—Sam’s sister put it on—but we’re not really watching.

“I want to,” I say.

“Then do it!” she says. She is right. But I don’t. He asks me for nude pictures and I say no, but he keeps asking, and I say no again, and I say no again. He asks me for nude pictures until I finally say yes. I don’t know why I say yes. I wait for summer to come, and when it does I stop responding to his texts.

Boys talk more than girls and soon the whole school knows that I sent a boy a nude picture and now I get texts asking for pictures weekly, from friends and non-friends, from Alex, Zach, and Peter; from boys I’ve never met and from Jack. I ignore them, deleting the texts as they come. Sometimes, I send a picture back, but I don’t know why and I delete the texts after.

eighth grade

It’s fall, and Sam, Henry, and I are playing soccer in the street outside Henry’s house. His mom has already put up decorations: a “Happy Halloween” sign on the door and a fake pumpkin on the stoop. The leaves are a deep, rusted orange, the air smells cold, and the wind swirls around us, tapping on our shoulders and brushing our cheeks. Henry kicks the ball to me, and I have to run down to catch it before it rolls down the hill. On Friday nights, we go to the high school football games, and we cuddle under a blanket. When winter comes, we go to see the gingerbread display downtown, and we hold hands and afterwards we go to David’s Chocolate to drink hot cocoa. When I break up with him, I tell everyone that it’s because even though he was never mean to me, he was mean to others. My dad is proud of me for this.

Then I date Hugh because all the girls like him. He is a skateboarder and a stoner and a drinker and a prankster, and I am a little scared of him. He puts matches in his mouth and lights them all up at once, and goes into the woods and takes off all his clothes. I date Hugh because I want to be more like him. Friday night I go to Hugh’s house after school. We watch “When Harry Met Sally” in his basement. Ten minutes in, he kisses me, and then we make out. His hands find my back, then my boobs, then they’re moving down my thighs and slipping into my pants. His fingers are cold. They press on my vagina and wiggle their way inside me. All I can think about is if I’m going to have to reach into his pants too. He unbuttons them for me, and I get the hint. When I find his dick, it feels weird, more like skin than most skin. When he finishes, it gets on my pants and leaves a stain.

He is the first boy I sit with during lunch. I look across the cafeteria and see Sam, and I give her a cringe smile that she returns. Maddie and Biz plot how they are going to get alcohol for the weekend, and Owen puts food scraps in Gus’ water and tries to get him to drink it. Will they invite me to drink with them? Hugh reaches his hand under the table. What would we do if they did? Thigh, inner thigh, vagina. Would we sit in someone’s basement and smoke weed? Under the pants, now the underwear. Would we walk through the woods together and go on adventures? As he fingers me, I look at Maddie and Biz, wondering if they can tell.

“Come on,” Hugh says after school one day. “If we’re gonna date, we gotta go on dates.” He goes downtown with friends that Friday, and they all hang out at his house after. I want to go too but instead he waits until they leave to invite me over. We sit in his basement and watch “The Shining.” It starts the same as before, but then he pushes my head down. I put my mouth on it, and before long, my throat hurts and my neck hurts and all I can think about is whether I should spit or swallow, but before I decide, it’s in my mouth and I have nowhere to spit, so I swallow.

A month in, I get invited to go downtown with him and his friends. We’re in Urban Outfitters, just looking. He walks into the fitting room to try on a shirt and tells me to come in with him. As soon as the door shuts, he unbuttons his pants and grabs my hand.

“Here?” I ask, my eyes wide in shock. There are feet shuffling outside—teens giving their parents clothes to buy. But he’s serious.

“It’s fine,” he says. He takes out his dick and I grab it as I stare at the door. Before he can finish there is a knock at the door.

“Only one person in at a time,” a woman says. When I leave the dressing room I try not to look anyone in the eye. We meet up with his friends, and Owen gives Hugh a look and Hugh nods smugly. Later that week, he asks me to hang out, and I say I’m busy until he says, “if we’re not gonna hang out we shouldn’t be dating.” We watch a movie in his basement. We watch another one the next week. It’s always the same, until one Friday after class I’m about to walk home with Sam when Hugh taps me on the shoulder.

“We have to talk,” he says. We step to the side, out of the crowd. Sam stands by the door, watching us.

“I think we should break up.” He says it slowly, two breaths, to make sure I get it. I try to swallow but it catches in my chest. My feet stick to the linoleum tile. My cheeks burn hot like iron. The people who were just at my elbows, bumping into my back and knocking at my hips, are suddenly outside, looking in, speaking in hushed, muted tones. I’m suddenly aware that too much time has passed. I need to say something but no words come. I think to myself, over and over, he’s waiting, everyone’s waiting, I need to say something. I think it until I can think nothing else, so when I go to speak, no words come.

“Lily,” Sam’s voice, soft and tender, right at my ear, just for me.

“Okay.” It’s my first breath out in what feels like minutes. “Okay.” This time, louder. I don’t look at his face when I turn to walk away. When Sam and I get to her house I lie on the kitchen floor and cry. Sam lies next to me, and I rest my head on her chest. She strokes my hair. I don’t know why I’m crying.

Boys talk more than girls, and I assume Hugh told people about the blowjobs, because I stop getting texts about nude pictures and start getting texts asking for handjobs and blowjobs. Cole has curly hair and a little bit of a chipmunk face, but he is cute and funny and good at hockey. He likes me, and I don’t know if I like him back, but I think I could. He texts me late Friday night, the last Friday of the school year. He asks what I’m doing and if I want to go down to the lake to hang out with him and some friends. I feel giddy, and I am not sure whether I want to go. My dad drives me to Michael’s Frozen Custard and we wait until we see the people I’m meeting. The dirty white tables are empty under the flickering lights. We wait in silence. I’m nervous, and I don’t know why. Finally we see them, appearing out of the shadows of the building. I see Cole first, and he smiles, and I smile, glad I came.

“Alright, have fun,” my dad says.

“Okay,” I say. I open the door and walk up to meet Cole and his friends. Cole and Biz and Maddie and Jack. So I guess they are friends.

“Hi,” Cole says. “We were gonna go climb the Center.”

“Sounds fun,” I say. Cole and I hang back, following the rest of them as they walk towards the Community Center, one of the most climbable, and therefore climbed, buildings in the vicinity.

“Are you excited for summer?” he asks. And we talk about boating and how much we love lakes and whether Max will invite Sam to his cabin this summer, even though they’ve only been dating for a month. I ask him if he thinks high school will be different. I follow the others. I can’t reach a ledge, and Cole reaches out a hand and pulls me up.

When we get to the top, we can see a blinking yellow light and the headlights of a car that zooms through it. And flashing lights, blue and red. We freeze and look at each other.

“Run,” Jack says. Everyone starts scrambling to get down. When I jump, I fall forward, landing with my hands on the asphalt. We run back towards Michael’s Frozen Custard. Under the lights, I can see the tiny rocks embedded in my skin. I try to rub them out and little flecks of blood appear.

“What’s wrong with your hands?” Cole asks when we stop running.

“Oh, nothing,” I say. “Just a little skinned.”

“Can I see?” he asks. I nod and he takes one of my hands in his. We decide to go to the lake to go swimming, but I look around and Cole and Maddie and Biz are gone. It’s just me and Jack, standing next to this vast pit of glistening water.

“Where did everyone go?” I ask.

“We should go skinny dipping,” he says. I look at him hard. He has that look in his eye, like he’s trying to read me but at the same time he doesn’t care what he reads; like he’s trying to make me read him.

“I don’t think so,” I say, shaking my head. I’m smiling but I don’t know why.

“Come on,” he says. Our faces are so close.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Come on,” he says. He says it ten times. I count. I keep looking down the beach, hoping Cole or Maddie or Biz will come back just in time. But they’re not here.

“Fine,” I say. Once I’ve decided, it’s easy. I slip out of my shorts, throw off my shirt, unclip my bra, pull down my underwear and run forward, straight for the water. I don’t look back to see if he’s undressing too, to see if he’s watching me. I swim around until I hear a splash. I still don’t look. But a minute later, I feel the water move next to me, and suddenly he’s at my side.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say. I’m breathless from the cold, and the nakedness, and the boy looking at me like he wants me. He steps closer. I keep my legs bent, so only my head and shoulders are out of the water. He asks for a blowjob. I look at the beach. Empty except a pile of clothes next to the lifeguard stand. I say no, and he asks again. He asks and asks and pleads and reasons and begs and asks and asks and asks. I say no 100 different ways before I say yes. But I do say yes. I could have left. I could have called my dad and had him pick me up. I could have called Cole and told him to come back. I could have walked home.

Instead, I think, the sooner I do it the sooner it will be over. So we go to where it’s shallow enough for me to blow him, dirty lake water dripping off his dick. Afterwards he thanks me. We go back to the shore and put on our clothes and walk down the path back towards Michael’s. Cole and Maddie and Biz are swinging on the playground.

“Where did you guys go?” Cole asks. Cole looks at me, but I keep my eyes on my ground, watching my feet rub circles into the dirt.

“Swimming,” Jack says.

 ———

The next day, I am sitting on my bed, staring at my purple walls and gold soccer trophies and cork board filled with movie stubs. I decide to go to Sam’s and walk out the door.

When I get there, just Sam and her sister are home. They’re sitting in the TV room watching “One Missed Call.” I lay down on the couch. They’re eating curry, and I don’t ask for any, which is strange for me. And I don’t say anything, not even hi or how’s it going.

“What’s wrong?” Sam asks. I don’t know if I want to tell her or not. I realize that even if I do, I don’t know what to say.

“I gave Jack a blowjob last night,” I say, finally.

“Lily,” she says, drawing out my name. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” I say. And that, more than anything, makes me want to curl up into a ball and cry. She says nothing for a long while. She just looks at me with these scrunched up eyebrows and pouty lips and sinking face, and I realize something that makes my insides crumble to something like dust, but worsedust. Like thick, mealy vomit chewed up and spat back out.

She feels bad for me. And I truly don’t know why. Because I know who I am. I do these things to myself, so I can come to Sam’s and lay on her kitchen floor and feel sorry for myself. I stay there the whole day, with her sitting next to me, the two of us watching TV in silence. By the time I go home, it’s dark out. I walk the long way, past the school. I check off the houses as I pass them. Dogs, bees, junk. I fight the urge to run back to Sam’s kitchen floor.

Blue Issue | February 2019 

All Your Eggs in One Freezer

“You know, freezing your eggs is a really good option. Especially if you’re not sure about where you’ll be or who you’ll be with when you’re ready,” my cousin told me, leaning against my aunt’s marble counter early last summer. She had frozen her eggs a few years ago, when she was 30 and single. She was now about to undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF) with her new husband.

Coincidently, I had just read an article titled “Why I Froze My Eggs (And You Should, Too)” that argued a woman’s ability to freeze her eggs was one of the greatest gender equalizers in history. The author urges women to freeze their eggs to gain agency over their reproductive process, removing the burden of their ticking biological clock and the pressure to settle down with a partner while they’re still young enough to have a healthy pregnancy. I had never thought about egg freezing before, and my newfound curiosity led me down the wormhole of articles detailing the triumph of women taking control of their fertility.

I was unsure if I even wanted kids and had always assumed that was a problem for later. But after reading all those articles and hearing my cousin’s advice, it seemed that decisions concerning my fertility future were looming. Apparently a woman’s fertility peaks at 22, so I needed to start considering my options. Or, at least, I needed to gain a better understanding of what all these options were, to make an informed decision later.

Between people I know undergoing IVF, friends thinking about selling their eggs to pay for college, and celebrities more and more frequently having kids via surrogacy (Kim Kardashian just announced she and Kanye are having their fourth child via surrogacy, after the success of their third), there appears to be a surplus of childbearing options. It seems easier than ever to have kids, but what do these options entail and who are they really for?

Anyone with egg-producing ovaries can undergo this process, whether they identity as female or not. Since my examples from testimonials and studies are from cis-women, I will often use “she/her/hers” pronouns in this piece; however this process is not exclusive to femme-identifying people.

Egg freezing is the first procedure in the IVF process. According to The New York Times, more than 75,000 women plan on freezing their eggs this year, either with an IVF procedure in the immediate or undetermined future. The name gives away the process: eggs are taken from a woman’s ovaries (via a process disturbingly called “harvesting”) and frozen, unfertilized, in a clinic.

There’s a lot that goes into the process to prepare for egg freezing. First, you have to inject yourself with synthetic hormones to stimulate egg production multiple times a day for a couple of weeks. You also have to take additional trips to the doctor to monitor egg development and various medications that accelerate egg maturity. Then, there’s the actual surgery, where your eggs are literally vacuumed out with a needle in about 20 minutes. The number of eggs retrieved depends on your age: if you’re around 30, typically 15 or so eggs are retrieved, and that number decreases to less than 10 in the late 30s.

When Bloomberg published a popular (so-called “groundbreaking”) article titled “Freeze your eggs, Free your career” five years ago, the cover girl advocating for the liberating effects of egg freezing paid a whopping $19,000 for the whole procedure. Today, the whole process, including the procedure and medication, costs upwards of $10,000 with around $1,200 in annual fees to store frozen eggs (fees vary by number of eggs). That’s still an incredibly large sum and unaffordable for many, especially those in their 20s and early 30s who haven’t had the time to build income. However, more and more companies, like Facebook and Apple, are helping cover the cost for employees. Many insurance companies are also starting to include it in their plans. It’s still a significant investment, but it’s beginning to be more manageable.

Whereas males produce sperm at an approximate rate of 1,500 per second, women are born with a finite number of eggs that age and decrease as the woman releases them during menstruation, until the age of 40. At that point, there’s only around a 5 percent chance of becoming pregnant. This imbalance contributes to a history of biological essentialism, of gender discrimination rooted in biological difference, and is why so many women are turning to freezing their eggs if they can afford it. It’s an attempt to level the fertility field. Men have never had to worry about a biological time constraint to have children, giving them an advantage of being able to focus on their careers for a good chunk of their 20s and 30s, so many women find the opportunity of egg freezing to be potentially equalizing.  

Advancing their careers, however, is not the top reason women are freezing their eggs. Last summer, The New York Times reported a yet-to-be-published study that found that the primary reason women were freezing their eggs was that they hadn’t found a suitable partner with whom to build a family. Based on 150 interviews with American and Israeli women who had already or were currently freezing their eggs, the study found that most participants were single and either driven by the uncertainty they’d find the right partner or had recently broken up with their partner. For many, egg freezing has evolved from a passing fad to a conventional step many adult women take, independent from any partner.

A number of testimonials on Eggsperience, a popular blog Valerie Landis created three years ago to chronicle her own egg freezing experience, explores the egg freezing phenomenon among millennials. Women in various stages of the fertility process from around the world relate their triumphs of egg freezing and personal benefits of the process. Barbara, a 39-year-old from Long Island, froze her eggs after she broke off her engagement. She writes, “Egg freezing helped me feel empowered about my life again.” Ase, from Singapore, went through two cycles of egg freezing last summer and is now “working to help other women in Asia to have the same opportunity and change the conversation.” Molly, a 37-year-old from Los Angeles, even talks about creating a podcast called “Spermcast” after she froze her eggs, “to explore options and find some sperm.” Apparently freezing one’s eggs helps in the dating world? Only two women said that, the jury’s still out on that one.  

The openness about fertility options among women appears generational; a few weeks after my cousin discussed her situation with me, my mom called me and asked, “What’s this whole IMF thing?” She said that she felt weird asking my aunt more about it, that it would have been invading my cousin’s privacy. It’s still a taboo subject for many people who didn’t grow up with the prevalence and growth of fertility options; however, their hesitation around discussing women’s fertility (or lack thereof) only increases women’s feelings of failure or of not fulfilling their expected role; either because they couldn’t conceive “naturally” or when egg freezing or IVF fails.

The woman on the cover of the aforementioned Bloomberg article tried to have a child last year at 45 and all 11 of her frozen eggs failed to fertilize. In an interview with The Washington Post, she said, “I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed. I questioned, ‘Why me? What did I do wrong?’” She did nothing wrong: although freezing eggs does increase a woman’s chances of conceiving later in life than if she did nothing, the chance of success still varies wildly. Basically, the younger you freeze your eggs, the better your chances are—but even those odds still range. The emotional toll is as varied as the success rate; many women put in a lot of money and energy into the process to still be childless after years of trying.

In an interview with The Guardian, one woman reports the feelings of empowerment from freezing her eggs diminishing when the thawing killed most of her eggs and then she miscarried the last one: “It had never occurred to me that it wouldn’t work. That was it: my last possibility of having a biological child.”

In addition to Eggsperience, there are many other blogs where women find solidarity through sharing their stories of frustration and failure. A lot of women write about the importance of staying positive, while others share the bleakness of losing hope. One woman writes, “With every subsequent failure, you come to expect it more. It gets harder to hope. You get more numb. For the first few IVF cycles, I put on a positive front for my support crew and my husband; no doubt he did the same for me. But now, we’re more honest with each other.”

Egg freezing and subsequent IVF treatments can have a significant impact on women’s mental health, and with no counseling sessions or therapeutic attention included in the price of treatment, it often is up to the patients to learn how to cope. The most significant thing women who undergo failed treatments say they experience is feelings of defeat: failure to perform, historically, the “most fundamental” aspect of being a woman. It is the fault of a society that emphasizes childbearing as a woman’s greatest quality for creating this internalized expectation. Yet, even if I recognize it’s a construct, and even if I’m not sure I want kids, I still feel a sense of entitlement that I should be able to have kids if I want to, when I want to, and that it would be unfair if I can’t.

“A Private Life,” a Netflix original movie released last year, tracks an artsy, witty couple in New York City as they journey through rounds of failed egg freezes, IVF, and eventually, surrogacy. Although the film is fiction, it is based off of the director’s real-life experience. The film focuses on the pain of the process and the stress it puts on the couple’s relationship—one argument on the streets is particularly memorable, with the woman screaming “Do you blame me?” at her husband while punching him, then dissolving into tears as they hug and cry together. In an interview with Bustle, the director Tamara Jenkins said that she wanted to illustrate the emotional pain women experience during the process and explore “the biological tyranny of being a woman.”

It may seem bleak, but the truth is that despite the vast achievements and growing opportunities for women’s fertility that open up careers and agency, it’s not always successful and definitely not without sacrifice. Biologically, it’s easiest for me to get pregnant right now. Will I do that? Fuck no. So will I freeze my eggs—if an employer helps cover the fee—in a few years to give me more time? Even if it still leaves uncertainty, it will probably still be the best option.

 Blue Issue | February 2019

Letter From the Editor: Blue

Dear Reader,

When I was younger, I used to practice signing my name with magnificent silver fountain pens borrowed from my father’s desk—whether it was for future autographs or just to perfect my penmanship is unclear. I would make large, cursive loops with the first letters of my four names, with the final “S” winding up above with a fantastic curve. My pen would never leave the page as I signed, letting the deep, cobalt blue ink seep and spread between the paper fibers. I was entranced by the blue expanding on the page—the same way it feels watching cornflower blues in the sky fade into a blue-almost-white as it meets the horizon. Or looking into the deep end of my neighborhood pool, the dark blue ominous and beckoning. I love blue, and blue makes me feel loved. It makes me feel as small as a robin’s egg or as wide as the Pacific ocean; I have cases of the blues, but I can also boogie down to Eiffel 65 (I'm blue da ba dee da ba daaa...). Blue is more than a color, it is a mood. It’s a full spectrum with subtle tones on one end and extreme vividness on the other. Blue has something for everyone, and this issue deals with all its shades.

Callie Zucker relates her love of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album and explores being vulnerable: maybe we should try to be more open to being broken, and life will reward with color. Or perhaps consider how you’d feel living next to a cemetery? Maddie McCann asks this question and meditates on the various, intriguing responses that cemetery-adjacent homeowners gave . (You might consider future properties close to corpses after!) Kat Snoddy sheds light on a mystical artist whom art history has overlooked, while Hannah Stoll deconstructs the “big bad wolf” myth, exposing the politics of wolf reintroduction to Colorado. Check out Westly Joseph’s account of her time at the UN Climate Change Conference and learn why bad wine is helping combat climate change . Enjoy Sara Fleming’s illuminating piece which points out the value and restorative qualities of acupuncture, based on her Colorado Springs acupuncture experience. And if you’re feeling nostalgic (or just want to appreciate a fantastic piece of fiction) read Elena Perez’s story on the dynamics and drama of life as a middle schooler—how we grow up, perhaps too quickly.

There are seventy-six official shades of blue, which maybe accounts for the variety of blue-inspired works in existence. Between beer names and song lyrics and an animated puppy that looks for clues, blue is a consistent source of creativity. One such product comes from the late, magnificent Mary Oliver with her collection “Blue Horses.”  Like Joni Mitchell, Oliver unearths a beauty and delicacy that kills me tenderly. Despite my lack of spirituality, I find her words deeply sacred and challenging to my very essence. Her work embodies what I think of as blue—an acute and raw blend of fierce joy and lingering melancholy. In one of her later poems in the collection, called “When Death Comes,” she writes, “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. / When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder / if I have made of my life something particular, and real. / I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, / or full of argument. / I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Ms. Oliver was no passing visitor, she built a home and invited you in to wonder at the world with her. Hopefully, we can give some semblance of the same experience; either way, we invite you in to wonder, learn, and above all, be blue.

Imagine this in beautiful blue ink,

Elizabeth Ann Tucker Smith (and the rest of Cipher Staff)

Blue Issue | February 2019

Letter From The Editor: Bad

Dear Reader,

I’ve got good news and bad news, everyone. Following convention, the bad news first: the world we live in seems to be a never-ending cycle of bad events followed by more bad events. Every headline appears to be pulled from the pages of a particularly cruel child’s Mad Libs book, whether it’s a capital-B bad one, like impending mass extinctions, or a headline more quietly bad, like “Lonely Library Dog Was So Sad When Nobody Came To Read To Him.” From the unrelenting threat of gun violence to wildfires devouring our homes to voter suppression to breakups to burning your morning coffee, the universe seems to be tending towards particular shitty, neverending entropy.

The good news? It’s not all bad. In all truth, I’ve never been one to look on the bright side; it hurts my eyes. So, to break up the bad, some good news: Australia is well on its way to eradicating cervical cancer by 2028! Mondelez International (the company behind Oreos and other snacks) divested from palm oil corporations that contribute to deforestation. In the past 17 years, new cases of HIV dropped by 36 percent, while Antiretroviral Therapy saved nearly 11.4 million lives since 2000. This was also a month of historic firsts: Laguna Pueblo woman Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids of the Ho-Chunk Nation became the first two Native American women to serve in Congress, 29 year old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman to serve in Congress, and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar became the two first Muslim women to be elected.

So while there is some good left, this issue focuses on every breed of bad: Take Anna Hill’s musical exploration of the dichotomies within country music’s bad boy, Johnny Cash, or Lindsey Aronson’s fascinating photo essay on Colorado Springs’ history as a healing haven for tuberculosis patients. There’s the bad that gets better, like the state of being and transformation of identity that Nathan Goodman explores in his article, and the bad that still endures in unexpected ways, like the strict Catholic sexual norms that Emma Olsen explores in her piece. While all of the articles in this issue grapple with some sort of badness, they also unearth the silver linings that are sometimes hard to find.

It’s easy to split up the world into the good and the bad; it’s simpler, cleaner, and more reassuring than assessing the middle grounds that exist in everything going on around us. But nothing is quite that black and white. Take this Floridian headline from a few weeks ago: “Florida man breaks into restaurant, strips naked, eats noodles, plays bongos.” On one hand, public indecency. But on the other, free concert. Okay, maybe that’s not the best example. But we do spend a lot of time parsing the relative goodness or badness of certain events or people and arguing for varying levels of moral absolutism. We crave the clarity of the good/ bad dichotomy in order to definitively know on which side of the board we fall. When it comes down to it, I think we’re all secretly worrying the same thing: Am I a bad person?

And if you’re reading this, let me tell you—in all likelihood, if you’re asking the question, you aren’t. If you think that’s bull, if you’re bullying yourself for mistakes you’ve made in the past or that you’re inevitably going to make in the future, then I’ve got good news for you: There’s always time to make things better, always a way to forgive yourself and others and reconcile the good and bad parts of you. And for what it’s worth, I think you’re a good person.

All the best, but more importantly, all the worst,

Callie Zucker (and the rest of Cipher staff)

Thou Shalt Not

I was in the seventh grade, squirming and sweating from the top of my ill-advised middle part down to the pinched toes in my church shoes. I hadn’t sat down across from the priest in that little room and “forgive-me-father-for-I-have-sinned” since my ceremonial first confession in second grade. It was easy when I was seven. I told the priest that I had been mean to my brother and sometimes missed a week of mass, and he sent me on my way with a few Hail Mary’s and a clean new soul. I didn’t have any real sins then.

But now, according to the paper shaking in my clammy hands, I did. It was a list of common sins that my youth group leader had given us to inspire our confessions. Apparently, the commandment “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” meant more than I thought it did. Apparently, thou also shalt not have sexual thoughts, kiss passionately, watch pornography, masturbate, engage in oral sex, premarital sex, or sex with a same-gendered partner, use birth control or contraception, or worst of all, get an abortion.

When I entered the confessional, I was shaking. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say it. To verbalize that I had had sexual thoughts, to say it out loud in front of a grown man and God himself, was just too shameful. So I thought my confession as hard as I could. God was all-knowing, after all; he would hear me. But because I didn’t verbalize my sin, I’m still not officially forgiven. This matters in the eyes of the church, and, for a long time, it mattered to me too.

From conversations I’ve had with Catholic friends, I know that this is not a unique experience. These rules have a way of getting into your head and staying there, even when you thought you were intellectually beyond believing them outright. Grappling with the Catholic faith, teachings, and belief system seems to be the consequence for almost everyone who grew up in a religious environment. In a sect known for its strict sexual rules, this experience inevitably overlaps with that of exploring and growing into one’s sexuality—a messy business in and of itself. There are individual stories embedded in that messiness, and I wanted to chart commonalities and recognize differences between my own personal experiences and those of an admittedly limited set of Catholic and ex-Catholic college students.

Their names are Flora*, Olivia*, and Mae. Flora goes to Colorado College, while Olivia and Mae are close friends from my hometown who attend other universities. Though our involvement with the church growing up differed slightly, a dissonance between ideology and emotion seems to run as a common thread across our experiences. It’s easy to feel uncomfortable with the strictness of Catholic sexual rules, but very difficult, especially as a middle or high schooler, to reflect on one’s own internalization of them. Flora described an experience of “feeling guilty without knowing why” whenever she thought or acted sexually. She realized that she “couldn’t trust” this feeling, so she tried not to let it impact her actions. But that wasn’t easy. As Flora put it, the Catholic doctrine is “beautifully written to the point of being really persuasive.” It required work and considerable stress for her to realize that “it is not actually more beautiful to abstain [from sex] or deny yourself.”

I never went to Catholic school; I never received these strict messages from my parents. As a straight, cisgender female in a loving and liberal home, I got a watered-down, minimally oppressive version of Catholic sexual education. But even that impacted me, filling my adolescent sexual world with guilt, shame, and anxiety—and guilt, shame, and anxiety about feeling that guilt, shame, and anxiety.

 It wasn’t that I feared going to hell; I wasn’t sure I even believed in hell. These feelings stemmed from my most basic desire to live as a good person, or at least my idea of one. My youth group leaders, who I deeply admired, framed abstinence as a form of the utmost respect for your body, your partner’s body, and God Himself. If you didn’t actively suppress sexual urges, you were physically and emotionally degrading yourself and the people you cared about most. In an appendix outlining the Church’s sexual rules, the Global Catholic Network uses terms such as “self-abuse” to describe masturbation and “infanticide” to characterize abortion and contraception. In their words, “When [LGBTQ+ persons] engage in homosexual activity, they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent.” This language carries a heavy emotional and moral charge that is used to justify its oppressive and homophobic implications. In the eyes of the church, sexual intercourse is divinely designed to produce life; any activity that diverts from that goal is an attack upon the sanctity of life itself.

Even as a malleable middle-schooler, I didn’t fully buy into these teachings. I believed, based on my own moral leanings and those of my parents, that homosexuality wasn’t sinful, that rights to contraception and abortion protected women, that people had sex because they wanted to and because it felt good—not just to have kids. But these ideas felt very far away from my personal experience. I wasn’t queer, I wasn’t pregnant, and I certainly wasn’t having sex.

It would be a cop-out and, quite frankly, an insult to my overall adolescent awkwardness to say that the Church was the only reason I didn’t date much in high school. Rather, the internal logic of abstinence and suppression worked in tandem with glossy media representations of women and relationships to unconsciously confirm my teenage growing pains and insecurities surrounding intimacy. Not only was I physically unworthy, according to the media, but I was told by a church I cared about that if I acted on society’s demands to be sexy, I was morally unworthy.

Thus, even though I wasn’t sexually active, I still experienced an unexplained feeling of guilt, an unconscious moral twisting of the stomach, whenever I made out or masturbated or watched porn or let my mind wander. Exploring my own sexuality made me feel immoral, so I simply didn’t. In the name of being careful and safe and good, I became the poster child of a repressed Catholic teenager.  

Unlike me, Olivia negotiated this guilt in the tumultuous world of high school dating, using it to strictly regulate the sexual terms of her relationships. We grew up together and attended the same church and schools since we were 7, so her interview echoed countless high school conversations questioning whether we truly had to wait for marriage. “I wasn’t comfortable doing more than kissing a boy for forever,” she said, explaining that she later decided that “everything but sex” was OK. This internal moral struggle came to a head when she finally had sex with her boyfriend. However, in Olivia’s words, “I didn’t regret it because I really loved him.”

It was a big deal for Olivia to love someone enough to be intimate with them. All three of the women I interviewed confirmed this sentiment; in their eyes (and the eyes of the Church), sex was placed on a pedestal. The idea of waiting until marriage elevates the act of intercourse by insisting that it belongs in a special institutional moment and purpose. Mae received this message from her Catholic school’s health curriculum (rather transparently called “wait training”). Though her family’s religion “bored and annoyed” her from an early age, and she described the class as somewhat laughable, she still came away with a lasting idea that sex was supposed to be special.

All of my interviewees paused when I asked what messages about sex they received at home, because it wasn’t talked about in any of our families. The importance of sex was therefore compounded by its hush-hushedness, its mystery—both within and outside of the Church.

However, when Flora and Olivia violated sexual mores and their families found out, these buried conversations were brought rather explosively to the surface. The first time sex was discussed in Flora’s home was when she lost her virginity at 15 and her mother discovered Plan B in her bedroom. Her parents not only denounced the fact that she had had premarital sex—saying that they themselves (conservative adult converts to the church) “regretted not waiting”—but also criticized her use of contraception. Whereas my youth group leaders’ logic about abstinence (or at least their rhetoric) had revolved around the sanctity of life, Flora’s parents played on the emotional and connective value of sex. They told her that the “union was more complete without a barrier.”

When Flora took communion at church that Sunday without first confessing her “sin” (a big no-no in the church), her mother was extremely upset, telling her that she was no longer allowed to attend mass with the family. This experience had a profound emotional effect on Flora, even though it didn’t deter her future sexual action. She described sobbing during a face-to-face confession with her priest and reflected, “I knew that what I did was wrong because of the way other people were treating me, but I had no real understanding of why it was a harmful thing to have done.”

Olivia described a similar conversation with her older brother after she started using birth control. He told her that he didn’t respect her decision and that abstinence was the only moral way to prevent pregnancy. Olivia remembers him citing biblical research as though it were fact, saying that he was “very worried about the direction [she] was going in.” He “was forcing [these lessons] on me in a way my family had never done before,” she said, in a way that implied that he “wanted to teach me, and wanted me to know what was true.” Olivia was extremely upset by her brother’s views, and the aggression and presumed objectivity with which he presented them. She believes that this still unresolved fight has put a significant rift in their otherwise close and loving relationship.

Flora, who identifies as gay, feels profoundly separated from her family because of their ideas of homosexuality. From our respective youth groups, Flora and I both received the message that non-heterosexual thoughts aren’t inherently damning, but that acting on those urges is. In the eyes of the church, the union between a homosexual couple isn’t real—it can never be validated by the Catholic institution, or by God. Therefore, though their sexual urges may be unconscious or inherent, all LGBTQ+ persons (though the church only acknowledges the existence of cisgendered people who identify as gay) are doomed to a life of suppression and unhappiness. Flora described herself as “super susceptible” to these ideas in middle school and early high school, taking them as “God’s decree.” Though she didn’t feel that her desires were wrong, she feared a world in which she wasn’t allowed to be happy—a world in which she couldn’t experience a “legitimate” union with a person she loved.

While the church’s logic is technically one of patronizing pity (“they were born this way, after all”), Flora characterized her father’s attitudes, expressed in conversations about homosexuality in general, as outright “homophobic and hateful.” When she resisted these views, a catastrophic fight ensued, in which her father was physically and verbally aggressive. This has not only irreparably damaged Flora’s relationship with her father but has also created an environment in which she does not feel safe to come out to her family “until [she] can be financially independent.” To come to terms with her sexuality, she had to grapple with both moral concerns and deep family conflict and divisions.

Mae, who also identifies as queer, was raised by a much more liberal single mother and grandmother. Though her grandma was “Catholic as fuck,” she did not express any hateful ideas about homosexuality. However, Mae was always very aware that those views existed, both in the church and in the outside world. At 10 years old, Mae asked her grandma what she thought about gay people. Her grandma said she felt “bad for what they had to go through in society.” Mae never came out to her grandmother, not for any fear of judgement, but because she “didn’t want her to worry” about her physical and emotional safety in an oppressive world. Though she never bought into the church’s teachings about homosexuality, Mae’s coming-out process was complicated by the awareness that these mores created a hostile environment. She said, “I never thought that I would go to hell for being gay, but I was in an environment where gay people were not treated well. I didn’t want to be gay because I didn’t want to deal with judgment or being treated poorly.”

Being a teenager and exploring one’s sexuality and identity, often for the first time, is a wobbly, unstable business that can be further complicated by oppressive religious ideologies. However, grappling with a faith-based identity did not stop there, not for me or anyone I interviewed. If anything, the highly sexualized and liberal world of college, isolated from the religious environments in which we grew up, made it even more complicated.

Personally, I didn’t even realize the effects that these mores had on me until I got to CC, where everyone seemed to be having sex all the time without a shred of the moral panic I had experienced in high school. Obviously, teenage repression and guilt is not the worst of the scars that the Catholic church has left on its children, not by a long shot. But I’m ashamed to say that recognizing the church’s complicity in the abuse and oppression of others hadn’t impacted my religious practices before college. I was horrified, but also distanced, from these injustices. What ultimately led me to stop going to mass was the personal realization that the church’s ideologies had impacted me, too. I have always defined my religious identity through a negotiation between what I believed on a sociopolitical level and what I believed spiritually. Only when I realized that the church had harmed me, even in its own small way, did I finally decide that its harm to others was something I couldn’t reconcile.

But I still identify as Catholic, even though I don’t currently practice. So does Flora, and so does Olivia (Mae never really did). It was the religion of our families, of our growing-up, even if we never completely agreed with it intellectually. And we all hold many aspects of Catholicism dear. I still believe in God. I still believe that sex and intimacy are special and important. I still draw comfort and home and happiness from the rituals and community of church. Catholic sexual education messed us all up, in ways both disparate and eerily similar, and it has harmed and confused countless others around the world. But it’s complicated, and it will continue to be complicated for a long time to come. Flora summed up this sense of nostalgia and moral melancholy: “Sometimes I feel like something is missing, and I know what’s missing. I should go to mass ... But I don’t know if the church is going to change for a long time, or even if it could, without becoming a different church.”

*Names have been changed for privacy.

Bad Issue | December 2018

The City of Sunshine

“Thousands Gladly Acknowledge That Health and Life Are Due to Colorado Springs,” reads a 19th-century pamphlet advertising the city. Colorado Springs’ roots lie in its purpose as a health and wellness city, as “The City of Sunshine,” where tuberculosis patients flocked in search of treatment in the late 19th century. In the era before antibiotic treatment for tuberculosis became available, fresh, dry, mountain air and sunshine was thought to rid the lungs of tubercular bacteria. It’s estimated that in the late 1800s, people afflicted with tuberculosis constituted at least one-third of the city’s population. Once the largest industry and economic driver in Colorado Springs, tuberculosis treatment shaped the city’s development and architecture in the years leading up to World War II.

Today, though the evidence of the city’s past with tuberculosis appears subdued, the infrastructure originally built to support treatment of the disease remains. Some of it even hides in plain sight, just steps away from Colorado College’s campus. This project emerged in response to my own curiosity about the city’s past as a nucleus of treatment, and is only a cursory glimpse into the history of tuberculosis in Colorado Springs.

Colorado Springs was home to upwards of 15 tuberculosis sanatoriums—residential treatment centers for tubercular patients—during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Sanatoriums housed common areas for dining and recreation, along with a score of offices and medical facilities. Each admitted patient would spend the day milling around these spaces and then would return to their personal eight-sided Gardiner tent (pictured above) at night. The Modern Woodmen of America Sanatorium, pictured here, was one of the largest sanatoriums in the region. Founded and operated by the fraternal benefit society of the same name, this sanatorium treated members of Modern Woodmen for free. Each sanatorium was known to have its own personality, patient profile, and level of accessibility—some facilities demanded higher payment and provided amenities, while others remained less costly and more bare-boned.

This Gardiner tent now sits alongside a parking lot at Penrose St. Francis Hospital, a former sanatorium. The tent’s interior—which includes only a scant cot and dresser—has been reconstructed as a model of what a sanatorium patient’s living space looked like. Today, the former sanatoriums themselves have been repurposed: Glockner Sanatorium is now Penrose St. Francis Hospital, Cragmor Sanatorium constitutes academic buildings at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and Montcalme Sanatorium operates as Miramont Castle, a local history museum in Manitou Springs. The structures that once configured these treatment centers, including Gardiner tents, now hide in the city’s crevices.

Sanatorium patients often lived in Gardiner tents year-round, come sun or snow. The patients’ willingness to endure severe, cold weather conditions in poorly-insulated tents attested to the deep-rooted belief that fresh Colorado air killed the disease. Many of the people seeking treatment in Colorado Springs did improve, and sanatoriums claimed that about 60 percent of patients were cured of their tuberculosis. Most facilities, however, refused patients in highly-progressed stages of the disease. It’s now believed that, rather than “fresh air,” lower levels of oxygen were responsible for improvements in the health of tubercular patients. Less oxygen prevented tubercular bacteria from reproducing and surviving easily. This, coupled with the common sanatorium regimen of lots of rest and high-caloric diets to promote weight gain (tuberculosis was known to “consume” the body, or greatly diminish body weight) often promoted recovery in those affected by the disease.

The invention of antibiotics during World War II presented a new and effective way to treat tuberculosis. By the late 1940s, with the need for sanatorium treatment quickly diminishing, the facilities began to disband. Gardiner tents assumed new roles as tool sheds and backyard storage units. In some cases, huts were repurposed to serve as homes for local businesses. Totally Nuts & Company in Manitou Springs operates today in two attached Gardiner huts.

In both sanatorium and home treatment, heliotherapy (the therapeutic use of sunlight) was one of the most popular and utilized forms of treatment. Patients spent warm days sunbathing, and cooler days lounging behind the large glass windows of sleeping porches.

Home treatment was also a popular method for those who could afford it. Families living with a tubercular patient often added sleeping porches to their houses, allowing for heliotherapy and exposure to fresh air within the home. These porches distinguish the Old North End neighborhood, where many houses still have fully-intact porches or structural skeletons of where the porches once were. This porch juts out of the second floor of a house now occupied by Colorado College students.

Today, Colorado Springs’ military presence stands in place of the tuberculosis treatment industry. The sanatoriums are gone, only a handful of Gardiner tents remain sprinkled around town, and little thought is given to the glass sleeping porches dotting the city. Still, the history of tuberculosis treatment lives on through these spaces. Colorado Springs is no longer commonly referred to as the “City of Sunshine,” but owes much of its infrastructure, large population, and position as a city on the map to its tuberculosis treatment history.

Bad Issue | December 2018

Becoming New Again

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to explode? To let all the things inside you erupt and shrivel into nothing? Let your baggage—painful and otherwise—be swept into a dustpan like the edges of a shattered snow globe? It is a way, maybe, of becoming new again, of becoming as close as you can to freshly-fallen snow before time and circumstances wreck it.

This idea has occupied an uncomfortable corner of my imagination for as long as I can remember, though not entirely by choice. The corrupting influence was a 10-minute long Canadian cartoon called “To Be,” which was broadcast as part of a programming block on Cartoon Network in the late ’90s. Pre-dating “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” the creepy (yet somehow cheerful) animation was the stuff of my early nightmares.

The basic synopsis is as follows: a visibly depressed woman receives an invitation to attend the unveiling of an eminent scientist’s newest experiment: a teleportation machine. As the scientist explains, the participant enters a chamber in which their molecular blueprint is copied and sent to a second chamber via radio waves. The matter in the second chamber is reassembled according to the exact pattern of the original. Lo and behold, exiting the second chamber is the participant, physically indistinguishable with memories intact. A small explosion goes off in the first chamber. The door opens to reveal smoke and—gasp!—the chamber is empty. The scientist explains how the copy, which has materialized in the desired location, is just as complete as the original, who has yet to move an inch. To the irreconcilable dilemma of having multiple copies of the same person running around, the scientist destroys the original.

The cartoon deals with an ontological thought experiment known as the “teletransport paradox.” The “Star Trek”-inspired technology begs the question of what constitutes identity—is it the body, which carries the physical memory of experience, or is it some coded sequence of memory that, like a blueprint, can be carbon copied onto a “blank disc” of matter? This paradox questions the morality of “terminating” what has, in the scientist’s mind, become a useless original. In the cartoon, the woman is aghast at the apparent act of murder. The scientist tries to explain the ethics of his device, divulging that he has used it on himself dozens of times and is still the same as he has always been, though his efforts at persuasion are largely in vain.

The woman suggests that if the scientist is so sure the copy is identical, why not delay destroying the original for five minutes to conduct a side-by-side appraisal (for science)? The scientist agrees and, suddenly, there are two of them, comparing each other’s birthmarks, likes and dislikes, library cards, and so forth. The warm mood is shattered, however, when the woman gives the all-too-real reminder, “Five minutes is up. Who is the original, who is the copy?” Panicked, the identical scientists argue over who has to die.

Chess is deemed the appropriate contest. The winner, they say (on totally arbitrary grounds) must be the original who, as the woman reminds the scientists by the end of the game, is ostensibly “useless.” The original must be destroyed. Screaming “I want to live,” one scientist pushes the other into the chamber and the cartoonishly stylized, blender death-machine is set to “pulverize.” Boom. Puff. The “original” scientist is dead. The copy, with sweat dripping down his brow, says he has to go. He runs away from his machines, his research, and his former self that he, just a moment ago, literally tore to shreds. The woman looks at the wreckage of the chess game. She picks up the losing king from the floor and sees the evil within herself. A murderer, she can’t go on. With a tear, she enters the first chamber. Her replica exits just in time to hear the anticipated explosion. Befuddled and having just entered the world, new and pure, “a guiltless copy,” the woman (version two) goes outside and sings a song about how wonderful it is to be. Songbirds circle her head and perch on her shoulder, singing:

 ———

Brand new me,

brand new day!

No more last month’s bills to pay.

They were owed by another me

and she has ceased to be!

Bluebird sitting on my head,

Aren't you glad my old one's dead?

Hello, brook! Good morning, tree!

I've just begun to be!

What’s this body I am using?

When I die will I be losing,

everything that I’m now choosing

to be, or not to be!

A simple fact, sad but true,

nothing’s fun unless it’s new.

That’s why we take turns to see,

what’s it like to be.

 ———

Like a fire that clears away oppressive undergrowth, conscientious self-destruction is a vehicle with which to create new life, a life without history. To live outside the shadow of all the bad you have ever done sounds appealing. The woman in the cartoon made the choice to become new again. I pause. I say the phrase out loud. “Becoming new again.”

For whatever reason, I think of snow; the radiant glare of inches-thick, fresh white that makes you feel like anything is possible. It’s like the world is new again, without stains, scars, or imperfections. You forget the potholes, nicks, and scratches. You forget you even have a car, let alone the dent in your left rear bumper, because it’s a relic from another world, from before the snow came. Gaseous vapor metamorphosizes into a liquid that hangs in the air, until cold and pressure transform it into a solid that, for now and eternity, exists in perpetual freefall, casting the sky in an opaque off-white.

The world stops and ends here, but could just as well go on forever—it makes no difference. Just as water and baptism symbolize new beginnings, snow creates a kind of blank slate. But the snow, in a strange contradiction, also helps me remember. It happens every year (fingers crossed on climate change) and falls in similar places. There is a kind of unchanging universality to the winter landscape. Just as much as a blizzard creates a fresh canvas, it is a scene remarkably similar to seasons past. It becomes a liminal space between worlds, a connection to places that we can no longer visit. The seeming incongruousness of snow, a tool to both remember and forget, opens the door to a series of questions. To what degree is the psychic dismantling of self and attachment to past experience possible? Are our identities a constant, comprised of the things that live only inside our heads? Or does the advancement of time transform our minds and bodies in an irreconcilable manner, changing who we are regardless of memory?

A few Sundays ago, I took my beaten-up Prius to my favorite spot on Gold Camp Road to check out the first big snowfall of the year. It’s a place where I’ve brought friends, cried, made love, tripped acid, and debated the existential tumult of personhood. A tree hangs over the side of the cliff, beaten into a sharp angle by the wind. I used to climb that tree and sit up top, trembling under the force of occasional gusts. For a while, there was a porcelain plaque underneath the tree memorializing “Bud,” who I’ve always assumed was someone’s dog. Since then, a few too many branches have fallen, making it risky to climb, and the burial stone has long since gone missing. The landscape has otherwise stayed the same. However, the body that occupies the space—the one sometimes called “Nathan”—has changed dramatically.

Sometimes I think of my child-self. I imagine my body as an old-fashioned Russian nesting doll, and each layer removed reveals a slightly smaller version inside. Digging closer to the center, I find the little three-year-old boy in blue overalls clutching an ever-smiling Buzz Lightyear toy, crying for his mother. The memory is from the first time I was taken away by the Chicago Department of Children and Family Services. Little child-me didn’t know where I was or why I was brought there. The Buzz Lightyear was my only friend when I was taken away, and it still sits on my dresser today. It is less a reminder of trauma, and more a way of bridging past and present, a physical manifestation of who I once was. I hold Buzz close to my chest, and I feel as if I can hold my child-self just a little bit closer, and tell him that everything is going to be OK. I envision calling out to my child-self, being transported across the linear chasm of time. I know for a fact, that I (as my present self) would be as unrecognizable as a stranger to that child.

Places and things bring back memories, but so too does the snow. “Mood-congruent memory” is a term in psychology that describes the phenomenon in which similar surroundings induce past feelings and memory (for instance, taking an exam in the same seat empirically improves test performance). It comes to mind when I walk through the student housing neighborhood east of Nevada. Surrounded by the ghosts of people I once knew, sitting on porches, drinking beer, laughing for a second, and very often doing nothing. I am shocked, and in many ways hurt, to remember that these ghosts feel all too real to be merely memories; time and my associations to space have become at odds.

——— 

Returning to Gold Camp Road, I begin my descent into a landscape that is a playful mixture of past and present. Joys and tragedies alike are recycled here. But the feeling, in the end, is mostly sad. My vision sweeps across the familiar milieu, as my mind’s eye inevitably journeys into the past. The voyage is bittersweet. Though it is the middle of the afternoon, I am shuttled back to a night in December 2016. The effervescence of stars lit the path ahead. I thought I was in love. We decided to stay up all night and forget about the next day and the day after. It almost worked.

I think back to the nesting dolls inside my body. Encapsulated by snow, they seem almost real. Each doll a person, a smaller version of me, whose thoughts and yearnings come through with a vibrancy that belies their age. But each one of them is dead.

 ———

My eyes are closed and the cold wind against my shoulders reminds me of that Thanksgiving at Standing Rock. I shudder and look down, realizing I’m still wearing the same jacket as I was then. My gut sinks in labored nostalgia. I regret everything.

White fluff becomes brown as slush meets mud. It freezes overnight and yellow streaks appear from where some drunk kid tried to spell his name.

Falling backwards, I am buried under the weight of snow. The freshly-fallen powder creates a deceptive warmth not unlike that morning after the blizzard. It was the day I rediscovered the childlike person sitting in my heart and watched, with wonder and amazement, as small drops of snow fell off the barren limbs of an overhead tree and onto my cheek. The snow soon dissolved and became translucent, dripping down my face like tears I had forgotten to cry. The sky was clear. I was 17, and it was the first time I knew peace.

I crush some snow in my hand. It is already hard-packed. Sometimes, I wish I could crush little parts of myself and let them be carried into nothing, like dust off a funeral pyre. I think back to that classic scene from “Citizen Kane,” of the dying mogul who, with his last words, whispers “Rosebud” and drops a snow globe, the last remaining token of his childhood. The audience watches as the world inside explodes.

Questions of my own identity come to mind often. I ask myself, “Am I who I was a year ago?” Sometimes, in moments of nostalgia, I try to become that person again, with all the loves, tribulations, successes, and defeats. As much as I resemble that person on the outside, I feel different. It is as though I entered the teleportation machine in a dream, and the copied-over body has become my new, similar-yet-distinct reality. It is an impossible task, to recreate the past in the present body. In the destructive impulses that seek to dismember those parts of ourselves that are no longer wanted, the teletransport paradox is a blessing and a curse. Wonderful yet terrifying, it gives light to the tug-of-war between continuity and change that is an inherent struggle of the human condition.

 ———

We see the dynamic play out in various facets and through a variety of mediums. The film “Another Earth” comes to mind. The heroine gets in a car crash that kills a mother and her young child, while the father in the car survives and is broken by grief. Responsible for their deaths, the heroine is ravaged by guilt until she discovers Another Earth, one that is identical in almost every way to the one she was inhabiting. This Other Earth is floating just outside orbit and is recognizable yet distinct; an alternate reality home to millions of forks in the road that lead to new futures.

In the movie, there’s a lottery in which the winner gets to take off in a spaceship and travel to the Other Earth. Against all odds, the heroine lands a ticket. She hopes, desperate beyond all measure, that she will find a world on the other end with the family she killed still intact. Traveling to Another Earth seems to be a way of leaving one’s history behind, a deliberate act of destruction that is also a kind of rebirth. Her hope to take off and escape the planet reminds me of the protagonist from “To Be,” entering the chamber and hoping to exit back into the world as something new, changed, and purified.

The heroine in the film, however, opts out and gives her ticket to the man whose life she helped destroy, thinking it is the best way to right her wrong. She smiles as she looks out the window at the other Earth, imagining a better world. Our bad deeds, however, are harder to escape than we think. The heroine returns home to find an identical copy of herself, staring from across the driveway. This copy is from the other Earth. The only difference between the worlds is that, in this one, the woman took the ticket instead of giving it away. There is no way to escape what she has done. The accident is for real. As much as she tries to shed her past, to hit the self-destruct key and run, she is ultimately forced to face herself. It’s like the scene from the cartoon when the two versions of the scientist examine each other. Staring into the eyes of a mirror image, their pupils leave a gaping hole and, lost, they fall.

When we die, or figuratively self-destruct, our memories wash away like tears in the shower. The water running over us signifies a kind of new becoming. As much as we either crave or despair the disassembly of physical and emotional memory, we are really left with very few choices. Apart from rare medical episodes, to metaphysically die and be rid of the past exists mostly as a thought experiment. As much as the concept intrigues us, we must be reminded that “teletransport” is unreal and likely impossible. We cannot simply press a “reset” button and be reborn. Even media around the sci-fi concept of memory erasure, like the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” problematizes the idea. Whether it be through seeing an old lover seen on a train or feeling a thought creeping and nagging in the back of the mind, our past and who we were yesterday will find us eventually. We cannot simply gut ourselves of the nesting dolls inside our body and be done with it all. Regardless of our inclinations, they are the building blocks of who we are today. It is our burden, perhaps, to find ways of remembering a past self, while still letting the present evolve and become new, again and again.

I like to keep mementos. They are inanimate objects that create a window into a dead past. Most often, they reflect mixed feelings and memories of experiences that have changed me. Buzz is a great example. The batteries are gone; the buttons don’t work. I also have a dog-eared note from a friend saying how much I scared him this one time and a hospital wristband from the time I drunkenly fell asleep in the snow. Tapestries and art hang from friends hang on the wall I no longer talk to but still love without reservation. They are symbols of lament, of a past that I, at another point, may have willed into oblivion. Resisting self-destruction, I let my past hang in front of me. I see all the bad that I have done, but it has less power now than when I keep it bottled. There is a level of acceptance, a tacit agreement formed between me and the ghosts that shroud my wall. It is as if I took all the nesting dolls buried in my body and exhumed them—I feel lighter, and a part of me inevitably smiles. My body has grown and will continue to grow. I can live on without having to watch myself explode.

Whatever happened to the vision of the unalienable, non-changing self? I think back to the Tralfamadorians, a fictional alien race that Kurt Vonnegut created. They exist in four dimensions and live through all time concurrently. “Now” is just a snapshot of a movie playing forwards and backwards on the same channel. Our world, however, is linear—we pass from one moment to the next. The past is irretrievable, and the future can only exist once the present is over. The illusion of memory is the closest we come to playing the role of fourth dimensional time travelers. The connection is mostly weak. Like lived experiences of snow on a mountain drive, it comes and goes with the time of day. Now and then, the connection is stronger; the phenomenon is viscerally tied to place. Sometimes, the connection can be to a person you never really knew.

My cousin Cebrin died of a heroin overdose. My uncle found her body in the closet. It was February 11th, 2002. I was too young to remember much, though I think of her whenever I visit that house. This time, I’m alone. There are bedrooms, but I choose to sleep on the greenhouse floor; the humidity is a nice juxtaposition to the dryness of the New Mexican desert. The room where she died is maybe 100 feet away. I am alone. I never knew her, yet here I am. I feel close, as if I can reach back into the chasm of time and transcend the 16-and-a-half years that separate our lives. We are connected through space and driven apart by time. She was so young. As I count back doing the math, I realize that she was 23. I am 23. Our lives suddenly seem like overlapping mesh, with little pieces clearing the abyss-like space in between. I never knew her, but little pieces of her have stuck with me, like this poem she wrote. My uncle posted it on her memorial page years ago.

——— 

(time)

Every once in a while, it hits you hard. You start thinking about all the things

that have happened, all the people and all the places. Everything’s changed

now, but you can still remember, you can still feel the way it was before.

There’s usually some song on that you listened to a lot at some point and

you just want some arms

to hold you so you can close your eyes and bury your head and drain

yourself. Your body’s held tightly and you could be anywhere at any time

and you let yourself go. You let the memories fly out and pain comes hitting

you hard inside your chest and stomach. Your muscles ache. Moans escape

your throat and leave you empty, and

you can feel the time that has slipped away.

 ———

Change is hard, and resisting it is harder. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there are said to be five bardos, or liminal passages, that frame our existence and reoccur in cycles. They are intermediate states, for which change is constant and unavoidable. Of those, the moment of death is critical. It is not so much that we ought to live in order to die, but that we ought to live in such a way that we are ready to move onto the next state, whenever that may be.

Thinking about what’s to come, I remember the snow. Just as my body has run through its share of physical manifestations, so too does the snow melt with the coming of spring. It falls again, but it does so inevitably changed. Our ephemeral nature is but snow. Seasons come and go, and we may not be the same people we were before. The cycles remain unchanged.

As attractive as exploding may sometimes appear, it is not the only way to let go. We can allow the good and bad of the past to become like snow and melt on a sunny day. In the same way that liquid water is transformed by heat into vapor, the ephemeral current of my cousin’s life has been recycled into the slowly churning cosmos, of which I too am a part. We can let go, though the things that matter have a way of staying with us forever. “To infinity and beyond,” as a friend would say.

Bad Issue | December 2018

The In-Between

The first time I learned about the in-between, I should have been sleeping. I should’ve been tucked into the trundle beneath Sylvie Hammond’s twin bed, dreaming of the purple-haired fairies decorating the sheets. I should have been sleeping.

“C’mon Sarah, wake up. Let’s go spy on them.” Sylvie reached over and shook me awake.

By “them,” Sylvie meant her older sister, Heidi, and all of her friends stationed in the basement. Heidi, seven years older than Sylvie, was celebrating her 18th birthday. We were in the fifth grade as Heidi was sailing into the limbo of legal, yet wholly un-adult, adulthood. All of those tall, sure bodies in the basement itched for lives in which they did not have to ask for a bathroom pass, while Sylvie and I were still enamored by recess and gold stars, not yet even wearing training bras. I only pretended to be asleep for a moment before abandoning those fairy sheets for my other favorite mythical creature: the teenager. With their full breasts and broad shoulders, their not-yet-grown, grown-up energy beat through the floorboards. Their presence terrified and comforted me; I was just as swept up by their delusions of invincibility as they were.

We sat at the top of the basement stairs as they fell on top of the couch and one another, succumbing to toxic liquids we’d never tasted. They laughed at everything and nothing, but I couldn’t see what was funny, even though I desperately wanted to. We watched the girls bend over with locked knees and toss their hair over their shoulders. Their ruddy red cheeks screamed words they felt were unnecessary to say, words like “touch,” “more,” and “yes,” words they would come to realize they needed now more than ever. We watched them wanting to be wanted. And, not knowing the implications, we wanted to be wanted, too.

Once they were all settled into the couch, Heidi swung her hips over to the DVD player and slid a disc into the machine. “American Pie Presents: Beta House.” The words slid across stock footage of a bucolic college campus, all greenery and backpacks and weathered brick buildings. We sat on the cold, wooden stairs and watched the boys on the screen pull at their groins beneath comforters and salivate over women with breasts larger than watermelons. We watched them drink beer until they couldn’t talk and call each other virgins like it was the worst thing they could be. I hadn’t known what a virgin was before that. I didn’t know I was one. Sylvie sat next to me, knocking her shoulders against mine at every dick joke and embarrassing moment.

“Should we really be watching this?” I whispered, keeping my head down.

“It’s fine, I’ve seen this a million times,” Sylvie dismissed me. “Don’t be such a wuss.”

I didn’t say anything for the rest of the movie.

We watched the girls in the movie romp around house parties in bras and underwear and let boys pour beer on their chests. We watched them be talked about, but never talked to. They shrieked and giggled and cried like those were the only things they could do. Like they were wind-up dolls with three-setting dials on their backs.

I didn’t realize when I was 10 that the girls were just props. They had long legs and hair and boys who would jump off rooftops for their attention. I wanted all of those things. I wanted to be a goal, something to achieve.

All of the boys in the movie were loud and mean, but no one cared. The older girls on the couch laughed at their cruelty, so I laughed too. It was just a joke, after all. It didn’t really matter.

I had never known the in-between before that night on the top of Sylvie Hammond’s stairs. I knew children, and I knew adults. I knew that I was young and taken care of and that eventually I would be older and have to take care of someone else. But I hadn’t known about the in-between; that there would be a time in my life when I wouldn’t be a child, but I would still be young: when I wouldn’t be taken care of, and I would have no one to take care of but myself. I met the in-between that night. I saw it in the movie and in Heidi’s low-cut top and in the pixelated boys’ curious hands. And now, even as I swim through the thick of it, this no man’s land, I’m still sitting on the top of those stairs. Trying to understand. Pretending that I do.

  ———

For the first month of college, I had no friends. Meeting your “friends for life” was not as easy as the movie made it seem that night eight years ago. My roommate didn’t speak any English, so our room was always overflowing with loneliness. Mine and hers both. I thought it might have begun to seep out from under the door frame, since I never saw anyone in the hall. All of my classes had hundreds of people in them, and I held my breath the entire time. I tried to sit next to someone new every day, but I couldn’t talk to anyone, so it didn’t really matter. I never even set foot in the dining hall.

As I walked to another class I couldn’t remember the name of, I realized I hadn’t spoken in two days. I had not said one word since I hung up the phone with my mother on Tuesday afternoon, and now it was Friday morning. I opened my mouth to speak, but I had no one to talk to, so I closed it again. I kept walking across the quad and past the student center. It was 10 a.m. and every square foot of the campus was covered in people. I watched the others and tried to figure out which screw or switch was missing in me that allowed them to breeze through their days flanked by laughter and words that hadn’t moved past my lips in 48 hours. I wondered if I had contracted a contagious disease, and the doctors had remembered to tell everyone except me.

Filing into the lecture hall between salmon streams of chatter, I sat down in the second to last row, farthest to the left. I told myself I sat there so I could easily slip out of the lecture early, but I never left early. I never had anything else to do. The real reason I sat there was because of the girls who sat in the last row: Genevieve Watkins and Thalia Bell. Girls named Genevieve and Thalia have parents with office jobs and SUVs and reason to think their daughters are destined for success. So they name them Genevieve and Thalia. Unforgettable names for girls not to be forgotten. Very different names than Sarah.

They did all the things I could not. I mean, so did all the others, but they seemed to do them better than anyone else. They spent every minute of class whispering about boys and drugs and which party they would say yes to tonight. They scoffed at the sorority girls with neon highlighters and matching travel mugs at the front of the room. Their eyes rolled to the back wall every time a boy even looked their direction. But the air grew tight and still whenever they walked into the room, like they were what we were all here for, even if the class had begun 45 minutes ago. Genevieve and Thalia were the main event. They always left early.

My crumbling Latvian grandmother always described my grandfather, who died before I was born, as having something called kvorka. Gasping between each word, she would say, “He wasn’t pretty or smart or rich or nice. But I couldn’t stop loving him.” Thalia and Genevieve had kvorka. They glided through their lives with the world wrapped around their pinky fingers for no good reason at all. Sure, they were pretty, but not showstoppers. Thalia’s eyes sunk deep into head and her cuticles were constantly bleeding. Genevieve couldn’t seem to find a way to wash the grease out of her hair and sometimes came to class in yesterday’s clothes. Yet, every girl still wanted to be them and every guy to be with them, like the girls in the movies who always end up covered in mud or without a prom date. We’re supposed to hate them, but we don’t. We liked the movie better when they were on top.

That day was like all other days. I listened to the professor drone on about things I already knew in a way that made me feel like I didn’t. Thalia and Genevieve snapped gum between their teeth with their feet on the seats in front of them. I typed mindless notes.

After about 40 minutes, Thalia sighed loudly enough to cause at least 12 people to turn their heads. Then she stood up and grabbed her things; Genevieve attempted to follow suit.

“I can’t find my phone,” Genevieve whispered to Thalia at a pitch louder than her normal speaking voice, dropping to her hands and knees. Thalia sighed again and tapped her foot. Then she looked at me. We caught eyes, and I couldn’t help but hold hers in mine for a second too long. She raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips, forcing my gaze back into my computer screen, mortified and childish. Then, before I could process what was happening, my computer was slid from under my palms, snapped shut by Thalia’s raw fingertips, and carted out the door.

I looked up and around and under the seat and at my lap. I wasn’t sure if I had just been just robbed or invited.

Either way, I had to get the computer back. I found Thalia perched on the concrete steps up to the building with Genevieve pacing in front her. They were both already halfway through a cigarette.

As I panted down the stairs, Thalia caught me with a glance over her shoulder.

“Listening to you pound on your keyboard like that was giving me a migraine.”

She greeted me with an outstretched cigarette between her bleeding hangnails. I had never smoked before. I took it anyway. So stealing my computer had been an invite, not a burglary, and I was in no place to reject invitations. I sat down next to Thalia and she held a lighter up to my face. I slipped the cigarette between my chapped lips and worried about setting my hair on fire.

“I’m Genevieve,” she said. I pretended not to know. Her legs were so much longer standing up. She took slow drags on her cigarette and blew the smoke out of her nose in thin wisps. I held it between my cheeks and swallowed every cough.

——— 

I don’t remember what they said after that, but I know I didn’t say anything. We worked like that from that moment forward. My girls with their queen names adopted me without a word. They told me my silence made me sexy, mysterious, like a woman with a secret. I told them I didn’t have a secret. They told me I’d find one soon. We went to parties with red wine-stained mouths and used them on boys whose names we couldn’t remember in the morning. We shopped for tiny clothes that made us feel what we were told was sexy. We smoked joints in the middle of the day and laid in the grass like we had nothing to do. I fell into the glory of the in-between, its nauseating current lulling me into a stupor.

“If I want to fuck, I’m gonna fuck. And I don’t give a shit what anybody has to say about it.”

We chanted these words, in their various forms, like a mantra. Each syllable took back the sting of boys’ grabbing, relentless hands and told us that liberation meant forgetting how to hurt. Our mantra erased nagging thoughts. It told us we were always in control and reminded us to forget the instances in which we were not. It was just a joke after all. It didn’t really matter.

One Sunday morning, Genevieve climbed into bed with Thalia and me, cradling her heels from the night before. She shook us awake and told us about the boy in whose bed she had slept. She remembered his name: Ricky Alvarez.

“It was the best lay of my life.” Her sleepless eyes were still bright despite mascara-stained dark circles. “He fucked me like he loved me.”

“But he doesn’t love you,” Thalia murmured, her eyes still closed. “They never do.” Then she rolled back over and we all fell asleep with the bitter taste of reality settling on our tongues.

Two days later, Genevieve started getting zits. And Genevieve never got zits. We knew because she told us every two minutes while furiously reapplying thick, pasty concealer. The angry, red bumps crowded the corners of her mouth like cold hands over a fire.

Five days later the zits kept coming. Getting angrier and angrier with every passing hour, they each developed crusty yellow peaks. Corks on volcanoes.

Six days later.

“Genevieve, you need to go to the fucking doctor. You look like you’ve got the clap. It’s embarrassing,” Thalia snapped one afternoon, replacing compassion with shame.

“I don’t have the clap, you idiot. It’s just a breakout.”

“Then prove it.”

Eight days later, drunk off cheap beer and empty stomachs, Genevieve told us the zits weren’t just on her face. She laid on the floor of Thalia’s windowless dorm room and spread her legs. We looked at the ferocious red between her thighs. The sea of leaking bumps coated her deepest parts, dripping blood and pus like hidden tears. Each bump stood as a painful reminder of the real world’s shadowy fist banging at the entranceway of our lives. I imagined what Genevieve felt when she walked. The chaffing of unwanted mistakes; the sting of regret with every step. It was the first time I saw her cry.

Nine days later, Thalia and I sat in the health center’s waiting room in chairs bolted to the ground. We stared at posters about mental health and sexual safety, refusing to actually read the words. We silently prayed that Genevieve was right.

She busted through the swinging, knobless door.

“Just impetigo, bitches! Not even sexually transmitted,” Genevieve shrieked, not caring who heard. “I told you! Don’t ever freak me out like that again.”

Thalia threw her head back and laughed at the paneled ceiling. “But it was sexually transmitted! There’s no way that guy didn’t give it to you.”

“But it’s not an STD! It’s totally curable. Just, like, a fluke accident. He’s so sexy. I knew he couldn’t have had an STD.”

I kept staring at the posters. My little sister had impetigo once. She got it from a toilet seat. Genevieve’s face and thighs were coated with an infection a public bathroom gave my little sister, and she was still calling that boy sexy. I thought about the girls in “American Pie.”

Once Genevieve’s topical cream dried up, any remnants of our fear and fragility did too. It was like nothing had ever happened. We partied and smoked and wore last night’s dress to breakfast. We lived our untethered lives uninterrupted.

One Friday night, when all of the music was bad and the boys uninterested, we surrendered early to Thalia’s room. Early as in 2 a.m.: our version of early. We sat on her floor and sipped whatever would put us to sleep. Someone banged on the door.

Genevieve got up to answer it, stumbling on her way there. She looked through the peephole and gasped.

“It’s Ricky Alvarez!” She whisper-screamed in a single breath, rushing over the mirror. She finger-combed her hair and wiped makeup from under her eyes.

“You’re still trying to fuck the guy who gave you an STD?” Thalia said, laughing with her whole mouth open. “Did you invite him here?”

“No. I don’t know what he’s doing here. And fuck you. You know it wasn’t an STD.” And with that Genevieve ripped open the door.

“Oh shit!” I heard a male voice belt from the threshold.

Genevieve feigned a sexy surprised face and threw her hair over her shoulder, immediately in character. “What are you doing here?” Her voice went up two octaves. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the room.

He was short and dirty and drunk. His greasy, dark hair fell into his eyes; he looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He was holding a bottle of Captain Morgan.

“Well, this was my room last year, and I just wanted to make sure the current owners knew how to party.” He snaked a hand around Genevieve’s waist. “But I already know they do.”

I could taste his thick, alcoholic breath all the way across the room and wondered how it felt on Genevieve’s neck. It couldn’t be good.

Thalia invited him to sit and pass the rum. Genevieve, Thalia, and the boy chatted about how much he drank last night, and his fraternity, and how he didn’t have to worry about getting a job thanks to his “unbelievable trust fund.” They laughed when nothing was funny.

 ———

And so I found myself back on the top of the stairs. Watching and never knowing. I didn’t understand Genevieve. I didn’t understand Thalia. I didn’t understand this boy. And I didn’t know why everyone was laughing. He said it would be hot if the two of them made out, so they did. They moaned artificially into each other’s mouths and grabbed at the other’s breasts. They rolled around on the floor, pretending to want. They made good props, even with the dirty hair and fuck-you attitudes. And I did too, staring with an open mouth and hollow eyes.

It was about us, but it wasn’t. Nothing really was. We acted like we did what we wanted when we wanted; like we governed our own in-between. But nothing we did was on our terms. We didn’t even have terms. We had what they told us and showed us. We had American Pie.

Bad Issue | December 2018

I Bet You Lie on Tinder

So I’m on Tinder, and this guy messages me: “Mmm.” Not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but I go ahead and respond, asking him if the cat in one of his pictures belongs to him. He responds that yes, it is his cat, and then follows with, “You dtf?” (“Dtf” meaning “down to *expletive.”) Ah. Hm. I do have to give him props for being so direct, but I don’t know of many people who would respond positively to that inquiry. Still, I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I attempt to revive our pathetic conversation. I ask him about the dog that is featured in one of his other pictures. Apparently laughing at my question (extrapolated from his use of the acronym “lol”), he responds that yes, it is his dog, and then proceeds to ask me AGAIN if I was “dtf.” This time, I don’t bother responding.

Now, I would like to explain something—this didn’t happen to me. It happened to Cass.

Enter Cassandra. According to her profile, Cass (as she likes to be called) moved from Georgia to Colorado, enjoys listening to the Beatles, and is “looking for an adventure.” Exactly what type of adventure Cass is looking for remains to be seen however, as we really don’t know much else about her besides her physical appearance: pink hair, average height, blue eyes.

I created Cass. She was born out of a conversation with a friend about what it means to be a stranger, and how online dating is just a streamlined form of interacting with strangers. I decided that I wanted to make a Tinder account to explore this phenomenon, but I didn’t want the person in the profile to be me. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I just didn’t want myself and my life advertised online in that way. I also wanted to see how feasible it would be to create a completely fake person, and use that fake account to interact with (supposedly) real people. So, hello Cassandra! I wanted to know how authenticity plays into creating relationships, specifically romantic relationships. And for this particular endeavor, I wanted to delve into online dating. So, I decided to use the application known as “Tinder.”

Thus began the Cass Project. After acquiring a bubblegum-colored wig and borrowing some of my housemate’s clothes, Tucker (my profound, beautiful, and devoted editor for this article) and I staged the pictures that we were going to use for Cass’s profile. We wanted to make it look like the pictures were from different places and times, so we experimented with flash/no flash, outside versus inside, and costume changes. Tucker, being the dedicated editor that she is, even made a guest appearance in one of the pictures that shows us holding drinks and sitting on a sofa, seemingly at a birthday party. We added a bio, and ta-da! We were live.

Popular folklore asserts that Tinder was created as a way to facilitate easy hookups between desperate (or not-so-desperate) single (or not-so-single) people who live near each other. Keeping this in mind, I wasn’t too surprised to discover that Tinder is often served hot, with a strong peppering of sexual flavor. This is evident in people’s bios, pictures (so much skin!), and messages. One guy advertised: “I may not go down in history, but I will go down on you” front and center on his bio, while another reminded us that: “You can’t choose your father, but you can choose your daddy.” One man even offered free healthcare: “Not a gynecologist, but I’ll take a look,” while another asked the question that has been plaguing us all: “On Tinder, why can women say ‘I only swiped right for your dog,’ but I can’t say ‘I only swiped right for your pussy?’” Another fine sir suggested: “Wanna play Barbie? I can be Ken and you can be the box I come in … I’m a sweetheart.” Thank goodness he redeemed himself with that last part. Another guy displayed his knack for fatherhood: “I’m a father of 2 beautiful kids so you know … 1) I’ll pull out 2) My pull out game is weak af 3) If you act like a spoiled brat, we will mostly likely get ice cream afterwards.” I send my condolences to those two children.

As I became more familiar with navigating the app, I wanted to know more about how Tinder actually worked. After a quick Google search, I discovered something called the “desirability score.” Basically, Tinder scores the “desirability” of people and then tries to match up people with similar “desirability scores.” How do they make these scores? Based off of what? It seems like this scoring system is meant to display “attractive people” to other “attractive people,” and “ugly people” to other “ugly people.” Not only is Tinder deciding who is attractive and who is not, but they then use that information to manipulate and influence their users.

 ———

One particular evening I was sitting at my dining room table, focused on a jigsaw puzzle. While I puzzled, Tucker sat across from me, holding my phone and concocting messages to send to random boys on Tinder. She was concentrating on formulating exactly the right thing to say, and we were laughing as she sent the same message to multiple guys: “Just made some homemade dumplings!” Never mind that it was really my housemate who had just cooked dumplings, the Tinder boys were impressed!

A few days later, I received the following message: “Soo you tryna swallow my kids?? [tongue emoji].” Suffice to say, I was thoroughly shook. My first instinct was to ignore this repulsive toad, but then I decided to respond. I asked him about the success rate of that line, and he responded, “Bout 80 percent tbh [shrug emoji].” It seems quite apparent to me that he was bluffing, but I humored him anyway. The conversation didn’t progress very much from there and ended with him asking, “So you don’t wanna?” No response from Cass.

What struck me the most was the sheer amount of confidence that oozed from the men on Tinder. Just for some examples of some of the disgustingly egotistical bios that I saw: “Heard that the world’s bee population is declining, so I hopped on here to snatch all the honey”; “Thicker than a bowl of oatmeal … The size of my calves say it all … Looking for a snack”; “Spend Fitties, Pet Kitties, Suck Titties”; “A 6’5, funny guy with good dick and conversation skills”; and there was even one suitor who documented the size of his penis with “Packing 13 inches … check me out on Snapchat ‘stallion13inch’ if you don’t believe the size.” Another guy informed us: “I’m unstoppable. I like my friends. I work hard and play hard. I like women. If you can cook you can be my friend. Don’t be a dumb bitch and all is well :) my confidence is high and I come across as arrogant … after all I am God’s gift to women.” Why is the default character trait for Tinder boys overconfident douchery? I doubt most of them would say any of this in person, yet it’s the norm in the online world. Why does the disconnect of a screen allow for such distasteful and (seemingly) shameless behavior?

——— 

Occasionally my time spent on Tinder elicited a few laughs. One guy’s profile said, “Bio? Nah I’m more of a physics guy.” Other humor was less deliberate: “Yes i know, Im in the Army, but no im not an douche.” Maybe this means I’m a literary snob, but to me, such blatant grammatical errors are hilarious. He really did try though, I’ll give him that. Another guy announced: “I’m ready to stepdad the fuck out of you and your little shitty kids.” I don’t know if his intention was one of comedic relief, but it had Tucker and I laughing for a good few minutes.

The majority of the time however, I felt pretty frustrated about the sheer number of shirtless pictures, douchey bios, and misogynistic attitudes, so I would just go into left-swiping-default-mode. But once, in the middle of my swiping frenzy, I paused and took a second to read this bio: “Have a kid. Was married but my wife just recently passed so I guess you could say I’m just looking for a friend.” I was so taken aback that I almost swiped right. Then I remembered that I had created an entirely fake person for my profile and realized that no matter how bad I felt for this man, there was no way that I ———could swipe right on him. I swiped left. I hope he found a friend.

This guy made me wonder, with the rise of social media, is it becoming harder to make friends in person? Are people turning to apps like Tinder to compensate for a lack of face-to-face friendships? Another man’s bio read, “I’m mostly very comfortable by myself but I’ve been pretty lonely lately. Thought I’d put myself out there …” This honesty also startled me. It’s not even a question or invitation, he simply shares that he feels lonely and that this is his way of putting himself out there. This guy, unlike the others, seemed to be truly searching for a connection. It made me question why I was there.

 ———

I would like to preface what I am about to say with this: I have never been catfished. Therefore, I don’t truly understand that particular feeling of deception. In spite of my slightly questionable actions, I never intended to hurt anyone. Nor do most people who catfish—usually they are simply people who are looking for a connection. When we first created the profile, Tucker and I attempted to swipe right on guys that we thought Cass would be interested in (kind of athletic, slightly basic, maybe a little boring). But as the experiment progressed, I began to feel guilty about deceiving (some) sweet boys, and I felt myself start to swipe right only on guys that seemed like jackasses. With their overblown egos and cocky attitudes, they were already slightly delusional and duping them didn’t really seem immoral.

So am I a catfish? I guess I am—a pink-haired catfish. I’m okay with that. Most of those guys seemed like assholes anyway, but maybe they’re just insecure. Can we catfish in the name of art? The pursuit of something more? Maybe the answer is yes.

I didn’t actually ever go on a date. I was so ready to, and I had done all the prep work for going out as Cassandra with some random Tinder boy. By this time, I had even created a whole list of information about Cass to make her believable: she’s from Marietta, Georgia; she worked at Chick-fil-A during high school, she is in her third year at CC (molecular bio major); she has a younger brother named George (nickname Georgie), he’s 17 years old and looking at UGA for college, go Bulldogs! Cass loves pigs and herself, she’s a low-key Christian, loves the Beatles, has had no significant relationships in the past (but had a high school sweetheart) and is experimenting—pink hair, no rules; she has a good sense of humor and an aggressive laugh.

But in the end, I lost my nerve. Thinking about going on a date, wearing a wig, trying to make my voice sound different; all of those thoughts mashed together in my head and left me feeling too guilty. Guilty for thinking I was hot shit, for making a fake Tinder and laughing about it with Tucker. Cass may have been ready to go on a date, but Clare was not. Even though Tinder itself may be inauthentic and deceptive, I still felt bad playing into its games.

Once I actually sat down to begin writing this piece, I immediately asked Tucker if I could delete my Tinder profile. By this point I felt pretty skeevy about the whole thing and was very ready to remove the evidence of my sins (although if I’m being honest, we all know that Cass and her lies are permanently etched into the Tinder data files; deleting my profile is only a thinly veiled attempt at forgetting that disturbing fact). Although now very prevalent in our society, online dating still gives me the heebie-jeebies, and the fact that I had not just a normal profile, but a completely fictional one, was not making me feel any better about the situation.

Tucker laughed and told me to keep it around, in case I needed some inspiration during the writing process. By this time, Cass had been on Tinder for about a month and a half. I really have no idea how many people saw my profile during that time but I guess we can assume that quite a few did. I wonder how many of those men saw right through my facade. I mean, it was just me wearing a pink wig. Even a few of my friends at CC have come up to me, questioning me and laughing at Cass after seeing her profile on Tinder.

Although Cass didn’t have anything remotely resembling a romantic relationship during this Tinder extravaganza, the exchanges she had reminded me of some of my own dismal romances. If I had to categorize my own romantic relationships, I would say that they have been brief. This experience with Cass only served to reinforce my feelings of romantic transience. I couldn’t even have a simple conversation with the boys on Tinder without wanting to rip off my own fingernails, fry them with coconut oil, and then grind them down with my back molars. While messaging the Tinder boys, I was either disgusted or bored. Many of the messages that Cass received were either vulgar pick-up lines or a “hey” and then nothing else. Even if I did respond to the “hey,” usually the responses were never anything more exciting than a “whats up.” No apostrophe, no question mark. Pursuing any semblance of a conversation felt like pulling teeth.

There was one point amidst all of the mindless swiping on random boys that I had a feeling that I still wanted them to swipe right on me, knowing full well that I had portrayed myself as a completely different person. Even though Cass is not me, not Clare, I couldn’t quite separate her from myself. We did share the same body, after all. Even as a completely different person, I wondered why I still wanted people to swipe right on me? It gave me a glimpse into the feelings of affirmation and being wanted that attract people to Tinder and keep them addicted to it. If you “match” with someone, then surely you’re worth something, right? In a way, programs like Tinder depend on those feelings to secure that they have enough users and that those users stay on the app.

Before this whole experiment began, I assumed that Tinder would be some sort of platform for people to meet and for an easy hookup. But amid the overt and offensive sexual offers, I saw profiles of men looking for friendship, someone to drink beers with, someone to hike with, someone to cook with, really anything. Somehow, Tinder has become a platform for people to find companionship. I thought that online dating would be pretty heavily focused on physical need, but it seems to me that it’s really more about the small intimacies that come from any kind of human relationship. People may create a Tinder profile because they haven’t hooked up with anyone in a while and want to “put themselves back out there,” but people also create Tinder profiles because they are missing the feeling of holding hands with someone on a chilly night and the way that cooking for two is always so much more satisfying than just cooking for one. Online dating isn’t simply the gross sex pot that I had previously imagined.

——— 

So then what? Where do we go from here? Is this type of loneliness new or are we just seeing it more because of access to technology and social media? It seems that we are so overwhelmed with images of love and romance and companionship and happiness and sex (in the movies, tv, etc.), and we want it—we want it badly—but are too caught up in our own worlds and our own lives that we go home each night, feeling lonely and wanting more. But nothing ever happens so we turn to other options, like these dating apps, and we give them a go.

Ultimately, the Cass Project was inconclusive because it’s clearly a mixed bag—there are people on Tinder like the schmucks just looking for sex, there are people on Tinder looking for a friend, and there are people that you’ll see on there that you know and respect in person. In the end, maybe I was, in a certain way, authentic on Tinder, because I didn’t actually end up going on a date. I felt too guilty to deceive even the shitty guys. So, yes, maybe people aren’t as authentic online as they are in real life, but is that really so bad? Maybe it doesn’t matter if we are authentic or not when meeting someone, because perhaps people really just want to talk to other people. If that makes people feel less alone, then maybe the end justifies the means.

Final thoughts: “You can be the hot thing of the week or my everything. It’s up to you ;)”

Bad Issue | December 2018

Coming Down With Johnny Cash

“Sunday Morning Coming Down”

When my dad played Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” for me as a kid, I envisioned the singer’s Sunday morning as some sort of fog descending from the sky onto the city. I laughed along with my dad, who was laughing about having a beer for breakfast and another for dessert. I pretended I knew what was so funny about that. There were pictures of Cash on the CD cases we had, but I either didn’t like them or didn’t ever connect them to his music. Instead, Johnny Cash became a man in my head, a figment of my imagination. The image of my Johnny Cash, his foggy morning coming down onto his body as he walked around, stayed in my head for years. I saw it every time I listened to the song, before I got older and realized that maybe the morning wasn’t the one doing the coming down after all. I still envision the morning descending on the earth and the streets, but now I also see the fog of the come-down and the hangover surrounding Cash’s body in the mist as he walked. I see the outside cloud making its way into people’s heads as they “stumble down the stairs / to meet the day.” When I was young, I was the Sunday school kid Cash walked past after his breakfast beer. Here I am now, some 15 years later, head pounding just like his, wishing to the Lord that I was stoned. Johnny Cash isn’t just a musician to me—he formed the world as I see it.

Cash’s work is forever on the line, in his music and in his life. But he hasn’t always fascinated me. For a while, he was just another country music artist: he loved Jesus, America, and his wife. He liked to sing about guns, about freedom, about trains and sinners and grace and the farm. But there’s also something to him that transcends genre. He’s been inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z are featured in one of his later music videos. My friends who didn’t grow up with a soundtrack of people like Waylon Jennings and David Allen Coe have still managed to find Cash and love him. I’ve started to realize that these dichotomies might be both the source of his discography’s seemingly eternal relevance, as well as my fixation and fascination with him. His albums don’t fit together to make a cogent whole, and sometimes neither do verses within the same song. But somehow it works, and somehow I still continue to accept the contradictions.  

“I Walk the Line”

In high school, I became infatuated—with people in my life, celebrities, pieces of art—very easily. I would indulge myself in my fixations on the walk home from school, my head clouded with moments replaying over and over. Cash, at one point, was one of these fixations. He spoke to the obsessive nature of life and love better than almost anyone. “I Walk the Line” was an integral part of the soundtrack to my walk home, my breath catching with the depth of his voice on the first line. “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.” Cash wrote the song about his then-wife, Vivian Liberto, promising to be true to her while he was touring and she remained at home. He sings, “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine / I keep my eyes wide open all the time / I keep the ends out for the tie that binds / Because you’re mine / I walk the line.” The simple phrases are what had such an effect on me. After the song is released, Cash will meet his second wife, his proclaimed love of his life, June Carter, while on tour. Later, Liberto would divorce Cash and raise their children on her own. Even without knowing this, the way Cash sings evokes a sort of resignation to the possessiveness of love, almost a dire warning to both others and the object of his desire.

“Hurt”

Johnny Cash’s most popular song on Apple Music is “Hurt.” It’s a cover of the Nine Inch Nails original, and Cash’s version is unexpectedly beautiful. A friend once told me that some people are made for just writing songs and some people are made for just singing them. He suggested that maybe Cash was one of the latter; the last five albums he recorded were, for the most part, covers or renditions of folk songs, and they revitalized his career. Maybe he can cover songs so well because he can be (and is) so many different people. “Hurt” seems like one of the more straightforward examples: one famous musician covers a famous band’s song. The band’s lead singer was skeptical at first but cried when he heard Cash’s “different, but every bit as pure” version of the song. His covers make me wonder about the songs he did write. In both the songs he covers and the songs he writes, he is contradictory: an outlaw and devoted husband, a sinner and a Christian, a lover and a prisoner. He transcends time periods and socioeconomic classes and identity. His music, at first glance, has almost nothing to do with his own life experiences. Whether it’s a song he wrote or not, it’s kind of like he’s singing covers of other people’s lives.

“Greystone Chapel (Live at Folsom Prison)”

At the end of Johnny Cash’s 1968 performance in the Folsom Prison in California, he announced that he was going to perform “Greystone Chapel” by Glen Sherley, a prisoner who was standing in the first row. The song hadn’t been recorded yet, but, unbeknownst to Sherley, a minister who worked in the prison had shown Cash the song. Later, after Sherley was released from prison, he made his own recording, which he begins by saying, “I’d like to try and do one for you now that some of you may have heard already, ‘cause the Man took it and made it his.’” It’s hard to tell whether Sherley is talking about the “Man in Black” (as people called Johnny Cash) or “the Man” as in the authorities with the power to oppress. Maybe Cash singing Sherley’s song about being in prison is exploiting the power he had as a famous musician who never spent more than one night in jail himself, or maybe the song deserved to be listened to and at the time Cash was the only one for the job. It’s difficult to say whether Cash’s use of the song was ultimately good for Sherley; after Sherley’s release, his career as a country music singer was inseparable from Cash’s. Cash eventually stopped allowing him to tour and perform with him because of his violent tendencies and threats. After that, Sherley died in a murder-suicide. Sherley’s song was a contribution to the canon of work (by himself and others) contemplating what it means to be imprisoned in America, what it means to be an outlaw, what it means to be bad, to be a sinner, to be an unfree man.

I’m not going to argue for the beauty of Cash’s version over Sherley’s. Both versions are live, but Cash’s is grand. Maybe it’s because June Carter, his new wife, is singing with him, and you can almost feel the love that exists between them. But there’s a yearning in the way Cash sings that I’m drawn to, and I can’t help but feel deeply.

“God’s Gonna Cut You Down”

 “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is a traditional folk song whose original writer is unknown. It’s been covered by artists across genres, but Cash’s rendition stands out. It’s ominous. It’s rhythm follows in the tradition of “Walk the Line” and “Ride This Train.” Cash’s version, however, stands apart from other renditions in its power and strength. Elvis’ cover, in comparison, seems almost juvenile next to Cash’s, whose somber interpretation is only strengthened by his voice, which is old, cracking, and fragile. He doesn’t attempt to hide his age. “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is on one of the last albums Cash recorded, and over the course of the song, Cash seems to cross the line from life into death with the shift in narration. The song’s first verse begins in first person, implying that he himself is the narrator of the song. This narrator is testifying as to his own encounters with God, but in the second verse turns to warn others. Cash sings, “Well, you may throw your rock and hide your hand / Workin' in the dark against your fellow man / But as sure as God made black and white / What's down in the dark will be brought to the light.” It’s as if he’s denouncing, warning, and judging the man he once so convincingly embodied, the man whose enticing outlaw aura is at the core of so much of his work, the man who he appeared to be just a verse before. But the shift from testimony to warning and judgement—from the one living to the one judging the lives of others—placed on his last album next to songs like “Further On Up the Road” and “I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now.”

“Do Lord”

I had been singing “Do Lord” for as long as I can remember before I heard Cash’s version. For a long time, I believed that there were certain melodies that I was born knowing. I couldn’t conceive of a time in my life in which I did not know certain sequences of notes (some of them not even formal enough for me to consider them songs), and “Do Lord” was one of them. I remember telling this to a friend, maybe in middle school, to her great confusion. I said something along the lines of, “You know how there are those songs that you’ve just always known? Like, you never had to learn the words or the music or anything because they are just ingrained in your brain and memory since you came out of the womb and always will be?” She did not know.

Of course now I know that logically this isn’t true, but parts of me haven’t accepted it yet. The songs, but especially “Do Lord,” seem too close and sacred to me to have ever not been part of my life. The first time I listened to Cash’s version of “My Mother’s Hymn Book,” I was caught off guard when it started to play, when I heard the deeply familiar melody accompanied by Cash’s smooth voice. I was in high school, it was night, I was driving home, and I started to cry. His was the first recorded version that I’d ever registered listening to, and now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not sure if I’ve even heard another.

“A Cup of Coffee”  

Without including something from Cash’s quasi-comedic albums, he might seem like some dark, sorrowful, and somber figure even in his joyful moments. I can’t decide whether I think his lighter albums (he also recorded children’s music) actually provide a counter to his heavier material, or serve to emphasize the humanity in the sorrow that pervades so much of his work. Probably both; his persona develops over time. The song is also a good example of the spoken word he uses in his concept albums: he’s telling a story, a story that is happening every night in diners around the country. Throughout the song he chuckles drunkenly, and throughout many of his live and comedy albums, he seems to be genuinely laughing at his own jokes; he’s endearing.

The sequence of songs on “Everybody Loves A Nut” makes me laugh. “A Cup of Coffee” is a drunken, half-spoken ode to the beauty of a cup of coffee before a drunken sleep. Following is “Austin Prison,” a song about being sentenced to death, and afterwards the languid “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog,” in which Cash threatens (humorously) to shoot the dog on the farm that bothers the hens. The order, taken as a representation of Cash’s world, leaves me in awe, partly because someone can remain genuine as he moves through topics as varied as he does, and partly because he had the nerve to do so. And maybe this is why Cash can last: he can be everything and anything, and he dares to. And so, as I drink coffee before I go to sleep on a Saturday night, as I wake up on Sunday morning and stumble down the stairs to meet the day, I can see the beauty—and humor and sorrow—in my world because I can see the beauty in Cash’s.

Bad Issue | December 2018

Between a Rock and a Queer Space

Four years after I came out to both my family and my school, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to attend Milwaukee’s Pride Parade. It was the end of my junior year of high school, shortly before the ritual of signing yearbooks and taking finals. It was also the middle of my athletic season. That spring and summer, I captained both the rugby and baseball teams. In response to my friend’s invitation, I said, “No, of course not. Those aren’t my people. I don’t belong there; the queer community doesn’t accept me anyway. Besides, I’ve got a game that day.” And I didn’t go. I’ve thought about going every year since, and every year since, I’ve stayed home. But something changed last semester. I’ve spent years only bringing up my sexuality when I thought it most mattered, and I often used it as an excuse to remove myself from uncomfortable situations. I wondered why I couldn’t be gay and look straight at the same time. I questioned the conflict between my queer identity and my straight appearance in the spaces where I felt most comfortable, among those who saw me first for who I am and after that, if at all, for my sexuality.

The air in the climbing gym is always thick with chalk. I work there, I train there, I know people there. For all intents and purposes, I belong there. And yet I hear things like, “I’ll suck your dick if you stick this move.” Not an overtly homophobic thing to say, but when I’m there climbing with those people, it brings me out of that space and reminds me that I’m not quite like them. I’m not able to make comments about male intimacy and have them land as jokes. If it makes any difference, the guy climbing didn’t stick the move, and the other definitely didn’t suck his dick.

Scenes like this are not uncommon in the outdoor spaces at Colorado College. While in Moab on a climbing trip with a couple of friends, we were at the base of a climb and the two people I was with were trading attempts at sending it. There’s a certain amount of pride associated with climbing; it’s a race to prove strength, which they believe translates to masculinity, as if the two are inextricably tied. The words “that’s gay” came out of one of their mouths. I don’t remember the context. I don’t remember what he thought was gay. In truth, the only gay part of the trip was me. Those words don’t get tossed around as freely as they once did. I haven’t heard the words in passing like I did in middle school and early high school. People would often slip up around me like when a friend my sophomore year of high school playfully said, “you’re homo,” before he quickly realized what he had said and apologized. Another instance more recent was a friend saying, “fag.” Although both of these friends had no mal-intent and quickly apologized, these memories stick with me. Invasions of comfort. Reminders that I’m not like them. It was only when this friend in Moab said “that’s gay” that I realized he didn’t know my sexuality.

“That’s gay, and I know that’s not the politically correct thing to say anymore, but this is the desert, we’re three dudes in the desert. I’ll try to curb my incorrectness on campus, but out here …”

I see, I thought, He doesn’t know I’m gay. And I sure as shit won’t tell him, I’d rather get on with the climbing than bring that up out here.

I still see that climber around, but the trip ended any chance of us becoming friends outside of climbing. He became too focused on climbing hard and not focused enough on the people he was climbing with. I became too aware of our differences.

In all honesty, I don’t know how many people that occupy the outdoor spaces on campus know that I’m gay. It’s something that I want people to know, but I don’t want to tell them. I’ve had to come out in every new space I’ve entered because of how I appear to the world, and sometimes it feels better to not come out right away. It feels better to keep quiet about my sexuality for a time in those spaces because it means I can hold onto that feeling of belonging. But I don’t want silence to be what makes me feel most comfortable, and that’s why it needs to change. In fact, I feel most comfortable around climbers. I speak their language. I understand them. But for every hour I spend as a climber, I spend an hour being reminded that I don’t fully fit in there.

I even cancelled my Seventh Block Break plans last year, because I didn’t want to spend the weekend in the desert with people I considered my closest friends but who make me feel uncomfortable. For as much as I love the desert, males feel pressure to assert their toxic masculinity in these spaces, and it disgusts me. I stayed home drinking and watching movies with my roommate instead.

Being at CC, I’ve realized that my sexuality feels at odds with my passion for climbing, so in order to better understand my role as a queer man in the outdoor community, I felt like I needed to engage with the queer community.

This past spring, I walked into a queer space on campus. I was nervous. So nervous that shortly before I walked up the steps, I texted my roommate: I don’t know how this is going to go. I’m actually super nervous, can we talk after if this doesn’t go well? The only image I had of the queer community up to that point were the people in my high school that were queer and flaunted their queerness as the defining feature of their personalities, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that openness made me feel out of place. I built my life around the idea that being queer wasn’t at the forefront of my identity; that many things like my interest in sports, film, and literature preceded my queerness. In the years since high school, I’ve come to realize that I had repressed my sexual orientation and had never given myself the opportunity to figure out how my queerness informed other parts of my identity.

Associating myself with the queer community felt like a defeat. For a long time, I wanted to keep my queerness hidden to fit into the way the world treats me: as a straight, white male. I recognize that I am white and male, and for the purposes of saving myself from homophobic conversations I didn’t want to have in high school and in many spaces since, I exploit those first. However, on that night last semester when I walked up the stairs of a house I wasn’t aware existed, I knew I needed to try. I knew that in order to reconcile the gap between my appearance and my sexuality, I needed to reach out to the queer community.

I entered the house that night and had no idea where to go. No idea who I should look for, where we were supposed to meet, or what we were going to do. I felt lost. I realized too late that I was wearing “straight clothes”—khaki pants, plaid flannel, Osprey trucker hat. I also hadn’t shaved in about a week, so my beard felt and probably looked unruly. I wished I had just worn a t-shirt, I wished I’d showered and put on deodorant. But there I was, a straight-passing gay man looking for answers.

In the living room of the house, three sets of eyes turned on me, and looked me up and down. Someone finally said, “Hi, can we help you?”

“I hope so,” I said, “I’m here for the group?” I won’t name the group. I will say however that I found it on a list of queer resources on campus that described the group as an established, weekly gathering for members of the queer community. I hoped it would be open and welcoming to all.

“For the group?” they said.

“Yeah, is this the right place?”

It felt like I had walked into a queer shrine and dragged mud all over the floor.

As we did introductions, one of the get-to-know-you things was to ask everyone the gayest thing they did over spring break. I said, “Tinder in Kentucky.” I felt them trying to figure out if I meant gay Tinder or straight Tinder, or God forbid, both Tinders. I felt them flinch with the understanding that they weren’t going to get it out of me that easy. In all honesty, that was my best answer. I spent my spring break climbing with friends. I didn’t go to any gay bars (not that there are many in Kentucky) nor did I do anything that I could point to and say, “Yes. That’s a very gay thing I did.” So I said the only gay-esque thing I could think of: the 10 minutes I spent swiping on Tinder while eating pizza in a climber’s bar.

I felt their uneasiness as they figured they might actually have to ask me how I identify. They didn’t want to ask, “Are you gay?” because I might not be. But they wanted to know. And if I wasn’t, they needed to know why I was there. But to be honest, I also needed to know why I was there.

I wanted someone to tell me how to fit into this straight-passing body. I wanted someone to tell me that it would all be alright and that someday my gayness and apparent straightness would just be.

I sat through an hour or so of conversation, trying my hardest to be gay enough for them without losing sense of myself. In truth, I do that every day. Every day, I look in the mirror, or in my dresser, or catch my reflection in the window of a building, and I hear a voice in the back of my head asking, “Are you too gay right now? Wait, are you too straight? That girl you just passed definitely felt uncomfortable next to you. Don’t look this girl in the eye, don’t smile, don’t let her think you’re checking her out.” It’s constant. But as I sat in that living room listening to people talk about being gay, how gay they are, asking me if Tinder in Kentucky is as repressed as it sounds (it is). For the first time in my life, I had to worry about not being gay enough.

It didn’t feel good to be pressured into forcing my gayness to the forefront of my personal expression. I wanted to talk about sexuality in the context of what it means to be me, not in how it makes me me.

Toward the end of the meeting, they invited me to go to queer prom that weekend. I said I’d think about it, and I meant that, but I very quickly I decided not to go. Not for lack of wanting to familiarize myself with CC’s queer community, but because of the looks on their faces when I walked in and told them I was there for the meeting. I don’t think I will ever enter a queer space unquestioned. I have to prove my queerness.

When I left the house, I texted my roommate: It didn’t go terribly, I think I’m alright, I won’t go back but I’m not super upset.

My roommate is straight. His girlfriend has stayed at our house many times. We’ve hiked mountains together. We’ve camped in the desert together. We’ve cooked together, eaten together, smoked together. I’ve cried on his shoulder. We’ve lived together and done all of that without judgement, without needing to point out our differences. I can tell him about the guy I’m interested in without needing to defend myself or remind him I’m gay. My sexuality doesn’t come up because it just is with him. It’s why we get along, because he sees me first as a friend and only peripherally as gay. He sees me how I see myself, and how I want outdoor spaces to see me. He is an example of the masculinity and type of friendship those spaces need, because the climbing community must recognize that people bring other identities into the gym or to the crags. Climbers need to treat other climbers first as people and then as climbers and look past the power screams and the try-hard faces. Around campfires in the desert, beers in hand, tired and excited, when their toxic masculinity starts to surface, an acceptance needs to also surface, an acceptance of differences and values.

Partly, I need to change how I approach the climbing community. It starts with an openness and willingness to bring my queerness into those spaces. I walked into that group with the hopes that I could reconcile my straight-passing body with my sexuality. But I didn’t find answers there. And that’s fine. I found answers from my roommate and other friends like him. Through those people, I figured out how I could be both straight-passing and gay. But there remains a barrier. When I walk into a climbing space on campus, I revert back to separating those parts of my identity. To change how people approach me in those spaces, I need to walk into them comfortable being gay and being a climber.

In short, we need to climb with friends instead of being friends with climbers.

———

Recently, Outdoor Education started planning a retreat for members of the Outdoor Education community aimed specifically at having a conversation about sexuality in the outdoors at CC. As I write this, it is still in its early stages and the details haven’t been finalized, but it is a step in the right direction. I am excited that Outdoor Education realizes the need to have this discussion and is willing to expand its reach to include people like me, people that want to exist fully and openly in all spaces.

Bad Issue | December 2018