March Things

Recommendations #1

Somehow this is the first year I’ve heard anyone use the expression “in like a lion, out like a lamb”—which is not, as one (me) might (reasonably) guess, a sexual euphemism, but a reference to the weather in March. Unfortunately, my March has been in like a lion and also like a lion in the middle, and it’s looking like it’ll go out like a lion too, not so much weather-wise, but in most other ways. The other day my professor looked at me as he was talking about how strange it is to teach politics in our present hellscape and I just let my eyes fill with tears. I think he thinks I’m losing it, and he may not be entirely wrong. I also have a lot of work to do, I guess.

Anyway, I was feeling sad that I haven’t had the time to write anything substantial here, but then I realized that now is the perfect time to write something insubstantial! Lighten things up a little, you know. I personally love recommendation lists,¹ so here are five random good things I’ve consumed/discovered/rediscovered recently:

1. Frozen raspberries

These are the only good frozen berry, and you can’t change my mind. Honourable mention goes to blueberries, which I keep around for pancake reasons, but really they can’t compare. Given the supremely irrational price of berries on the West Coast—dishonourable mention goes to the Asian supermarket near my house that sells $17 pints of strawberries—frozen berries are necessary workaround. But the frozen raspberry isn’t just a shadow of its fresh self; it’s something completely different and exciting. Frozen raspberries also remind me of high school, when Della and I, and sometimes Alexander, would eat them straight from the bag, sitting on the kitchen counter or sprawled out together on the floor. They’re bangin’ in smoothies, with yogurt (still frozen and mixed in, or microwaved to make a ‘lil poor man’s compote to pour over the top), and on their own, and if you stir them into oatmeal it turns pink.²

2. Sentence fragments

Everyone has their favourite grammatical error, mine is the comma splice.³ But things have changed. Maybe forever. Because I’ve finally learned to appreciate sentence fragments. For a long time, this has seemed to me like a silly, sort of childish way to write. It’s like: look. A pause. For dramatic effect. For the sake of immediacy. How obvious. How very like a YA novel. But then two things happened to me. The first is that I finished reading The God of Small Things, which absolutely destroyed me. Arundhati Roy is a genius. She also likes her prose as full of periods as I like my pancakes full of blueberries. That or her sentences never end, they just spiral on and on… Anyway, the sentence fragments are one of the main reasons I found this book hard to get into at first. Another is that I first started reading it aloud with Navya a few summers ago, when she and I took the ferry to Toronto Island to lay under the big willow trees and get kicked out of the lake by the lifeguard. Speaking of fruit, that was also the first time I tried a golden kiwi (“It tastes like the sun!”⁴). The God of Small Things is stunning, but it’s not a great book to read aloud, and in my defence, Navya has an advantage in terms of her ability to keep the Indian names straight. It’s also hard to start a book in such a perfect context and then pick it up again when your friend is far away and life tastes less like the sun. I’m so glad I did, though. To be clear, I don’t think her use of sentence fragments is what makes Roy an exceptional writer. But it’s like when you meet someone you don’t initially think you could be friends with, go through some kind of intense bonding experience, and then can’t help but love each other on the other side: I can’t help that this beautiful book endeared me to Roy’s writing style. I also think I’m secure enough now in my own writing to care much less than I used to about looking silly.

The second thing that happened to me is, of course, a girl. How obvious.

3. Antibiotics

I wanted to put some music on this list, but that feels a bit disrespectful to myself now because, embarrassingly, I have an ear infection and can’t wear headphones. The world is strange when you can only hear from one side; it’s disorienting to move through a room unable to triangulate sound properly, and I haven’t exactly been on top of my game social interaction-wise. On the bright side, I’m very grateful to be alive at the same time as antibiotics! Medicine blows my mind, even more so as my teenage I’m-going-to-med-school phase fades further into the distance and things I once half-understood become re-mystified. And I guess we should be extra grateful now, seeing as if everything else doesn’t get us first, antibiotic resistance definitely will. I should probably be discouraging antibiotics instead of recommending them. Sorry, I know, I’m keeping it light! Once I can hear again, there’s lots of music I’m excited to listen to. My favourite album that came out recently, courtesy of Mai and Yao, is Saya Gray’s debut. Also, in a surprising turn of events, I finally gave Billie Eilish’s huge album from last year a proper listen—I stopped listening in high school because I got bored and also because I find her aesthetic extremely off-putting—and I remembered how beautiful and expressive her voice is. Her Tiny Desk Concert is so good. For now, my bus rides are pleasantly muffled. Send me music recs, and don’t use Q-tips kids!

4. The Hardest Thing I’ve Had to Read in University

I’m not recommending you read this, because most people probably should not and do not need to. But, I think you should go find the hardest thing you do need to read and read it. For me, this thing was “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” which is an essay published by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 1988. It’s extremely famous and has been influential across several disciplines, and I’ve been meaning to read it since someone brought it up in my Soviet history tutorial two years ago. It’s also incredibly dense, requires a lot of theoretical context to understand, and is full of phrases like “libidinal economy,” “semioses of the social text,” and “the micrological texture of power.” It took me days to get through and made me feel so dumb—which is to say, humbled. After struggling to the end of the piece, reading a few esoteric exchanges between various French poststructuralists, and learning some more about the practice of widow sacrifice, I still felt dumb, but I also felt alive in my brain.⁵ I gently laid aside several other, more reasonable topics that I have a much better handle on and decided to write my final paper for the course on this, the Hardest Thing I’ve Had to Read in University. There’s a fine line between productively challenging yourself and just making things harder than they need to be, but I think it’s good to push your limits in situations that make you feel both humble and alive. I realize it’s weird that I’m yolo-ing at you about reading theory, but hey! This is what I’ve been doing. I’m just trying to make it exciting. Go find your hardest thing.

Spoiler: the subaltern cannot speak.

5. Getting punched in the face

Okay so this is technically not a March thing, but whatever. I make the rules here. I started kickboxing at the beginning of this year, and I think you should try it too if you haven’t already!⁶ It gives me a rush of adrenaline that other kinds of workouts don’t. There’s a thrill in repeatedly almost being hit, and even the shock when your partner does accidentally nail you once in a while feels good. Going to kickboxing class also makes me feel vulnerable in deeper way, because it’s a sport that’s social and requires a good deal of trust, and because I’m not very good at it. I feel like a kid in gym class again, psyching myself up to try even though everyone can see me and I know I might fall or miss or strike out. As an adult, I pretty much only work out independently—I go to some group classes, spin and that sort of thing, but they don’t really require me to interact with anyone—so this is new and uncomfortable for me. Here again, of course, the lesson is about humility and feeling alive. I’d also like to say that I’m very grateful for Keanna, who suggested we try this together, partially as a bonding experience to fast-track the development of a friendship out of our awkwardly polite but mutually affectionate classmate relationship. She’s more socially anxious than I am, but far braver. Respect.

That’s all for now! Here’s hoping that March madness will be followed by April mildness. Or something. Love ya <3

1. Shoutout to the person who commented on one of my other posts and suggested Perfectly Imperfect! The niche rec emails always brighten my day, and definitely helped inspire the format here.

2. I’d also like to give a warm shoutout to raspberry tea, which I had at the hair salon along with a teeny tiny cup of popcorn, and which revived me like nothing has in a long time!

3. Don’t you dare tell me to use semicolons all the time; they’re ugly as hell, and should be used sparingly.

4. My absolute favourite line from Autobiography of Red

5. It’s very possible that this essay isn’t actually that difficult for most people, and I am just dumb. It’s also possible it wasn’t actually that difficult for me, but felt like it because I had hyped it up as the next final boss of political theory I needed to defeat (Georg Lukács behind me). No hate to Spivak in any case. On to the next one

6. The tragic caveat is that I think I have to lay off kickboxing because it’s doing bad things to my joints. At the ripe age of almost-23, I am old.